With this chapter I will provide some flesh and blood to the topic of discussion by going into detail with how performance, participation and collaborative design play out in terms of a distinct design anthro-pological practice. As an introduction to the details of my own empiri-cal work, I will first provide a brief example of a possible role for ethnography in design that has often appeared as media stories.
The case of Go-Gurt is often brought up to demonstrate the value of ethnographic observation for product development—first by the researchers themselves (Squires 2002) and subsequently by numerous observers of the industry (e.g. Jørgensen 2003:135-137). The American National Association for the Practice of Anthropology presented this topic under the heading How an Anthropologist Created Go-Gurt, as an allegedly “healthy, fun, breakfast alternative” (NAPA, no year).
Based on ethnographic observations, the researchers succeeded in reframing the client’s image of breakfast. They found that breakfast in American families was as much about hurried meals by individual family members rushing between scattered activities throughout the day as it was about the day’s first social and nutritious family gather-ing as depicted in idealized images from the 1950s (Squires 2002). On the manufacturer’s website it reads:
Go-GURT® Portable Yogurt, the first-ever yogurt in a tube, is the per-fect snack for on-the-go kids. Not only do kids love Go-GURT® yogurt’s fun tube and interactive promotions, but they can’t get enough of the smooth, creamy texture and wide variety of great, fun flavors like Strawberry Splash and Cool Cotton Candy.
The thinking behind this kind of ethnography in consumer research
seems to be along the lines “if we can just, via the ethnographers, get
more information that is closer to the user, then we will come up with
great and novel design ideas”. But this is predicated on the false
assumption that there is a direct connection between an interesting
observation and an interesting design suggestion. However interesting
this study is as a reframing of a dominant understanding of breakfast,
my point is that it does not in and by itself lead to interesting design
ideas. These ethnographic observations of everyday eating habits
could have led to a thousand other “solutions” than “healthy nutritious
food” in a colorful tube containing 17% sugar. The usual framing of the
story of how ethnographic insights have led to product innovations trivializes the design work involved in exploring possible alternatives to the situation under study, and furthermore limits the role of eth-nography to feed user representations into a black-boxed machinery of innovation.
What is left unexplored here is the two-way working of representa-tions, which I try to conceptualize below with a notion of playful otherness. When “they” are made present to “us” in various represen-tational media, video for example, the screen is also the screen on which we project our own interests, fantasies and desires concerning the Other, and against whom our identities are defined and con-structed. In other words, because the ethnographic representation of users is directed at specific audiences with specific interests in them, the possibility of continuing this dialogical movement is—at least logically if not always practically—available.
The often explicit stakes and interests of the change agencies that design anthropologists work with constitute an important re-source for the possibility of continuing the dialogue set in motion by the initial encounter and momentary conflation of interest between change agencies, users and researchers. The projection of change-oriented interests and fantasies onto images of use can certainly be performed as acts of domination, but also as a commitment to them, taking them seriously and adding to them. If designerly responses to representations of use can be captured as such, embodying at once a sense of authentic everyday use and a designerly interpretation in light of new technological possibilities, the projections may become of renewed value to the represented users.
This possibility of returning the communicative gesture of users
who participated in creating representations in the first place
necessi-tates higher degrees of inclusive user participation than is often the
case in commercial contexts. It entails seeking a more committed
interaction with the people involved in the study, and amplifying and
extending the reciprocity of the ethnographic encounter. Instead of
reducing the field encounter to finite market transactions, where
informants are paid for their time and knowledge with vouchers or
movie theatre tickets, it might prove more fruitful to strive for an
extension of the relationship through user participation. This could
mean participation based on the initial reasons for the encounter,
namely those aspects of the user’s life that could potentially benefit
from the possibilities of change that the design anthropologist
repsents through his or her alliance with a change agency and its
re-search and development resources. A strategy for achieving this is
through the establishment of a platform where the culture of use can be portrayed in terms of the culture of design. Below I will try to explicate what this means in terms of my own concrete design anthro-pological practices.
Articulating a User and a Site for Observation In the introductory stage of the project Mobility in Maintenance three program managers from Microsoft Business Solutions authored a document entitled Mobile Devices at the Shop Floor. Let us consider two excerpts that in their original context served to illustrate the potential of using mobile terminals in connection with ERP systems in the manufacturing company:
In manufacturing the employees often have immediate information needs in order to have the production line running optimally. A mobile phone extended with computer facilities provides new opportunities to help manufacturing employees receive and send relevant information, when the need arises.
The information can be tailored according to who you are, for example:
– You have different needs if you are new, than the more experi-enced employees.
– You are, for instance, by machine number 16 and need to see an operating- or security instruction.
– You are in the middle of, for instance, quality assurance, and you could possibly take a picture of the situation and record a voicemail to maintenance about problems with a specific unit.
– You can see if an ingredient is in stock and where it is stocked.
– You can see the current production batch, and you can leave a message for the next shift, etc. (…)
The goal is to examine needs and possibilities to improve/simplify the daily routines of planning and execution of the production, as well as changes and feedback relating to production data for employees on the shop floor by means of mobile devices (Pocket PCs, PDAs and small Tab-let PCs) with the advantages and disadvantages this may imply for the employees and the management
(Internal project document, November 2004).
The list of imagined examples of situations where information pro-vided by a mobile extension to an ERP system could potentially be beneficial goes on after the excerpt. What is striking already in the first few lines is the use of the first person singular: “you”. It indicates the authors’ attempt at identification with the imagined user. This document was not directed at these imagined users “on the shop floor”
however, but rather served as an expression of interest during the process of project establishment between the managers of the manu-facturing company, the design researchers from ITU and the program managers from MBS. The document articulates the importance of relevant information delivered in the right time and place, hence the need for a networked and portable information solution. MBS, of course, are performed as the enablers of this kind of technology.
Although the statement of the goal of the project mentions two imag-ined beneficiaries, the employees and management, all the examples from the bulleted list target the employees on the “shop floor”.
In order to articulate the interests of the researchers, it was im-portant to clarify or populate the subject position of “the user”. Who exactly was meant by “you”? The imagined user in the project was subsequently narrowed down from “manufacturing” to cover only maintenance employees, i.e. the service technicians and the mainte-nance manager at the particular manufacturing facility of KiMs.
Three weeks later, a delegation of researchers from ITU and program managers from MBS had planned a visit KiMs in order to clarify the intent and objectives of the project. As preparation we sent a proposal of particular project activities: “a two-day visit at KiMs, where three people from ITU accompanies three selected employees in their work-day in order to create trustworthy user portraits and video stories of the work” (Internal project document, 30.11.2004).
The chief technology officer and the maintenance manager of KiMs agreed to this proposal as a way for them to explore the possi-bilities of mobile electronic support for maintenance work. Hence we had established a common interest in the project, and the category of
“the user” was down to three unspecified employees plus the
mainte-nance manager. At the actual meeting at KiMs on the 11
thof January
2005, we were introduced to the CTO, the maintenance manager and
two service technicians. The category of “the user” was hereby
popu-lated with particular individuals: Palle Sørensen and Lasse
Rosen-strøm who work respectively as smith and electrician at KiMs. Three
weeks later, Lasse and Palle had each agreed to be accompanied and
video recorded by a researcher during a work shift. This narrowing
down of the category of the user to two particular individuals located
in a certain factory on a particular winter day in Søndersø both served
to construct “the field” of user research, and connected a highly ab-stract idea of a future part of a globally sold ERP system to particular instances of its future use.
Time-wise, MBS wanted to aim the design efforts at “some years ahead, but based on currently available technologies” (from project email 25.1.2004). In practice this meant that the technological ideas of the project would have to run on a Microsoft operating system, for example Windows for Pocket PC.
Initially Microsoft was interested in testing if our approach to design could deliver a design-oriented material appropriate for basing a high-level management decision about entering a new business application area. As the project progressed and we became more familiar with the concerns of MBS, this general interest was instanti-ated by the particular question: Should a particular ERP system have a mobile extension? One challenge for MBS in addressing this ques-tion was that they had limited knowledge of the new group of users of mobile applications, who do not match the long standing desktop metaphor of personal computers. Accordingly they were sometimes referred to as “desk less users”.
This challenge provided a reasonably clear fit with the compe-tences brought into the project by us design researchers, and we framed the task as one of producing images of what future use of mobile devices could look like: images of practical use situations.
The shop floor of KiMs was not obvious as a field site for exploring the use of a maintenance system running on mobile devices. From the simple fact that such a system did not yet exist, the challenge was to construct this particular shop floor as a site in which such a system could be relevant, and by alliance with a competent technology devel-opment organization to establish the possibility that such a system could be built. There is a lot of persuasion, seduction and political maneuvering involved in establishing this imagery. And to complicate matters further, the collective project interest in maintenance work was not even given as a starting point.
During our primary field visit at the shop floor of KiMs, our focus
on maintenance practice was only one out of three different
perspec-tives on the site: “production”, “quality assurance”, and
“mainte-nance”. In fact, simultaneous to our study of maintenance practice, we
addressed the shop floor through a different lens: that of quality
assurance. It was not until months after the initial fieldwork at the
shop floor that the perspectives of quality assurance and production
were skipped, and the video recordings from the site of the production
line came to represent maintenance work exclusively. With this change in the scope of the project, certain areas of the location lost their significance, e.g. the QA laboratories for analyzing samples of the produce, despite their central location by the production line.
On behalf of the employees involved in production, the trade un-ion representative at KiMs refused to participate in any video-based research collaboration with us, since a prior experiment with video monitoring of the production line had led to regrettable feelings of being under surveillance. We decided not to try and convince them into participation. Our engagement with quality assurance had begun, but the date for the planned collaborative workshop kept being changed and postponed on their part, and eventually this area of focus was discontinued because the management of this division seemed insufficiently committed.
The definition of an appropriate site of use is usually not a logical consequence of the collective definition of design interest. Instead, an appropriate site of use is gradually articulated in parallel with the formulation of particular design interests in a highly contingent process.
A Methodological Negative
Even when an appropriate site for user observation has been estab-lished, such as the Trauma Center as a site for exploring Flexible Treatment Rooms, the local logics of practice may prevent it from being studied directly.
The trauma room—usually void of action or other people, but im-posing the sense of potential intensity through the mere objects in the room—was explicitly not a site for creative reconfigurations. The chief physician was very clear on this issue: we were not to concern our-selves with suggesting changes to the trauma room, because it is already subjected to an intense professional attention and a relevant training programme for coordinating the detailed conduct and collabo-ration of the multidisciplinary trauma teams. The configucollabo-ration of this room taken together almost makes up a complete choreography of activities that are not yet taking place. The hangers with anti-radiation protective wear, the poster with the schematized emergency procedure, the central position of the bed are all specific indicators for this potential action of taking X-rays and mobilizing the team of trauma experts to gather around the traumatized center of attention.
From the position of the anesthesiology unit vis-à-vis the steel table
with sterile tools in relation to the bed, the positions of the nurses and
the surgeon can readily be read. The educational role of student
observers as well as their appropriate place in the room is indicated by
the yellow peripheral line on the floor marking a safety-distance to the operating personnel.
Although the functional layout of the specific trauma room was governed by an extremely tight spatial regime, this is not the case for many of the surrounding facilities of the Trauma Center where our snapshots from the field illustrated rooms and places which were more open to being reconfigured through the particular situations of use.
In this project many of our observations regarded the paradoxical phenomenon of preparing for the unexpected, and this is what I refer to as the methodological negative: to study that which does not hap-pen through its reflection in everything else. In the Trauma Center much work is continuously being done to prepare the staff, the equip-ment and the rooms for something which for the majority of the time remains a potentiality: the severe emergency where one or more traumatized patients are brought in at the same time. The meticulous placement and preparation of instruments, specialists, medical sup-plies and furniture is a constant concern, and almost all activities in the Trauma Center reflect this issue of avoiding situations where the unexpected comes as a surprise. The demand to be prepared poses heavy constraints on the use of rooms and equipment. For example when a nurse cannot locate his pair of scissors, he cannot just take the one that he positively knows where is, since everything in the trauma room has to be precisely in its place and where it is expected to be in an emergency situation. The trauma room has to be vacant, sterile and fully equipped at all times. The paradox for our inquiry lies in the fact that while this room and its specialized and intense activities is the focal point of the Trauma Center, we inquired more into its “nega-tive” imprint on everything around it, such as: the reception and evaluation of patients’ medical needs, the borderland between the reception area and the rest of the specialized departments of the hospital, the relationship between space and activity in the patients’
waiting zone, the coordination of other patients who have not yet been assigned a destination for evaluation, and finally the dynamics of mixed-activity rooms.
With the sections above I want to remind that the user is not in any
simple way “out there”. The establishment of appropriate sites of use,
and not least for observing it, requires a lot of work; work that mainly
has to do with establishing persuasive links between abstract
catego-ries of users to particular places and people. Having established a field
for the observation of use, we shall now move on to a discussion of
what kinds of representations we have sought to bring back from the
different fields of use.
Fragmenting Reality
With a short personal incident I would like to illustrate how the designerly demand for re-workable ethnographic material first came across to me as an almost brutal sense of destruction. After an intense period of practical project work in the Space Studio in 2002 (creating and handling field material, organizing workshops, producing a deliverable outcome etc), I withdrew to more solitary surroundings in my home to read, reflect and write. When I returned to the studio I was quite frankly shocked to see what my fellow design researchers had done to what I considered my field material. The COMIT video clips of everyday IT-users, I had assumed, seemed to belong more to me than to the rest of the design team, because they constituted the first-hand material from a series of field visits that I had carried out.
Some of the video clips of everyday-life situations had been cut up into even smaller fragments than before, of about 20 seconds’ duration, by my colleagues. And they had been reshuffled to distance them from their original context: clips from one informant’s work practice were deliberately presented in close conjunction with clips from leisure activities of another informant, apparently with no comparative analytical intent, but rather as a new synthesis between the clips.
To me, this amounted to using another ethnographer’s field notes for purposes quite different than the author intended. In an anthro-pology department this would be unthinkable. Here fieldnotes are personal, and if anything, it can be discussed if the informants appear-ing in them could possibly have a right to read what the ethnographer might have noted about them. Only rarely are informants or col-leagues invited to actively participate in analyzing and synthesizing fieldnotes, and definitely not without the participation or explicit consent of the primary fieldworker.
However, the point of recounting this experience here is not to
debunk my colleagues for not accrediting me superior rights over the
field material. Rather, it is to point to some differences in
anthropo-logical practice vis-à-vis collaborative design research that become
apparent from traversing the border. One of the reasons for the pain
that this cut-up of material inflicted upon me was that I was in the
process of attuning my mainly ethnographic practice to that of
col-laborative design. While I took a disciplinary pride in the integrity of
my ethnographic accounts of everyday use—I was thinking along the
lines of “you have to understand this man’s working practice, before
you begin mixing it up with fragments of this woman’s leisure practice
and turning it all into fictive composites” —this integrity of stories
was exactly what the design researchers considered an obstacle for
creating new openings for design. It was not merely that they required openness of the material, but rather that closure of the account is something to be obtained through collaboration. The requirement I was faced with was to include the participants of the workshop in the narration of the video clips.
While my framing of the representations was probably the most legitimate one available in ethnographic terms, it was probably not the most appropriate in terms of collaborative design. The incident serves to illustrate an ethnographer’s frustration with the different rules of the game in the field of design, and I have eventually reached a point where I am more comfortable with conceptualizing the ten-sions between the two different fields of enquiry as fundamental resources for a design anthropological practice that embraces the interventionist impulse.
In preparing ethnographic material for presentation and exploration at a subsequent design workshop, the question arises: Why present the findings from the field as short fragmentary video snapshots with no coherent order? The answer on the abstract level is given: because it ensures that the material is open for interpretations and re-configurations by diverse stakeholders. Piecing together a narrative on the basis of fragmented and under-narrated video clips requires so many gaps to be filled on the part of the participants, that they are forced to actively rethink the issues in question. It just doesn’t always work.
The few times I have presented the material from COMIT and Mobility in Maintenance to fellow researchers (for example to ethnog-raphers at EPIC 2005) simulating the collaborative workshop setup from the actual projects, I have re-experienced a bit of my initial frustration in presenting detached pieces of knowledge, wrenched apart by a kind of violence. It makes a huge difference, however, to play design games in the context of the particular project and to simulate it in the context of general design research. The frustration does not derive from the fragmentation of the account, but rather from the participants’ limited ability to piece together a plausible or desir-able vision of what the account may be about. In other words, the particular and concrete stakes that the project participants invest in the field material is crucial for their shared ability to make something meaningful out of it.
If one accepts the proposition that the ethnographic contribution
to design is strengthened if it also delivers openings for reworking the
material, then shaping the ethnographic value for design in a realist
and representationalist idiom becomes less relevant. This move
indi-cates a widening space for design anthropology as an experimental and generative strategy of using snapshots of everyday practice to prompt further reactions by competent stakeholders. Instead of seek-ing to lay out a coherent account of what is really out there, this approach works by picking out something that at first sight appears evocative, temporarily making it the center of collective attention, and subsequently asking fellow project participants to assist in making something more of it.
The value of the design anthropological contribution depends on this extension of representations, and their ability to catch on and prompt others to relate to it in novel and skillful ways. Let me try to conceptualize this.
Playful Otherness
The main competence of ethnographers is usually seen as an ability to describe the culture of others. Accordingly, an obvious task for ethnog-raphers working with designers is to describe the culture of the people the designers wish to address with their design; i.e. the users. I would like to complicate this conception of “the task”.
While the culture of users exists in their homes, their
work-places, and their village or wherever they use, the ethnography of this
culture exists in power point presentations, persona descriptions, and
white papers. What is important here is that ethnographers have
always brought notes, images, drawings, objects, queries, images and
more lately audio-visual recordings back from their field studies to
make something special out of them. Clifford Geertz was one of the
first anthropologists to characterize anthropological writings as
fictions—fictions as in “something made”, not “false” (Geertz
1973:15-16). It is not a matter of collecting and carrying home as many masks,
customs or interviews as possible, but the degree to which one is able
to create new meanings. The power of anthropological imagination is
to bring us closer to the lives of strangers. While ethnographers have
traditionally framed their interpretations as scientific monographies
addressing an academic audience, the current demand for
ethno-graphic descriptions by other audiences, such as design agencies and
communities of design research, creates new opportunities for
inter-pretations. The first risk to avoid for ethnography in design is to avoid
producing overly naïve accounts—where the user is merely the one to
be known; the ethnographer is the producer of representations; and
the client is the recipient. The handling of complex sets of mirrors is
perhaps the most basic ethnographic competency needed for
succeed-ing with an experimental setup where many different players are active, observe each other and employ strategies for engaging allies to further particular agendas and silence others. Let us turn to a con-crete situation of when I was observing and interviewing Lasse, a service technician at KiMs: In walking the round at KiMs we pass through the centrally located maintenance workshop several times to check for the availability of spare parts, to chat and coordinate repairs with colleagues, and eventually also to document some of the repairs carried out earlier in the night. Lasse demonstrates the current maintenance system, which consists of a spreadsheet on a stationary computer with each row representing a maintenance task with vary-ing status, e.g. completed, urgent, or in progress. He comments on the system:
Lasse: “…this works like hell, in my opinion. Unfortunately.”
Joachim: “Ok?”
Lasse: “It is just as much our fault. But it is just not always that easy.
Now, I have been over there and fixed who knows how many things, right? And to remember everything that you have done, if you have to type it in… Well, it is simply not possible. That’s why we should have some kind of hand-held thing dig-dig-dig [making typing sounds with his mouth, and tapping his fingers on an imaginative handheld device] where we could just enter it, and then on to the next task!”
Joachim: “Yes.”
Lasse: “’cause if we had to run back and forth and type in here every single time, then we wouldn’t be able to manage half of it out there.”
(From video of field visit, January 2005)
In the incident above where Lasse shows me the Excel spread sheet currently functioning as maintenance documentation and planning system, it turns out that Lasse does not enter anything into the
sys-Figure 12: Between repairs Lasse demonstrates the use of an Excel spread sheet in a back office.
tem after all. Apparently he has taken me to the office space to show me particularly what he does not do. The way Lasse deliberately put his non-use of the spreadsheet for documenting maintenance tasks on display for me and the video camera is a direct consequence of the specific way he is offered ethnographic attention: of the way he per-ceives me, my interests and the possibilities these interests entail for his own purposes. While I am to a certain extent interested in under-standing his regular work practices “as they are”, the real potential for this kind of mini-ethnography resides in eliciting the skilled profes-sional’s response to an initial statement of possibility. Instead of a disinterested search for universal truths or even particular truths, it is driven by particular interests and a desire to improve. The instance illustrates that from the outset of the ethnographic encounter, Lasse has taken up the invitation to explore what maintenance work could be as much as what it already is.
Lasse knows that he is supposed to fill in his work in the spread sheet. When he states that “it is just as much our fault” that the system does not work well, he acknowledges that he and his col-leagues do not use it systematically enough for it to be useful as a tool for neither planning nor documenting maintenance activities. Lasse does not feel the urgency of going to the office space and entering the documentation of completed repairs at a work station while there are still unfinished jobs to do “out there” on the shop floor. Rather than just showing me how his work practice is, Lasse takes this as an occasion to direct my attention to what bothers him about the tool that his manager actually does use to maintain an overview of the mainte-nance status. Since I did not pose as a disinterested researcher, but rather as a researcher with a certain design interest in KiMs as expressed in my alliance with MBS, Lasse takes up this invitation to air concerns that portable MBS products could potentially help allevi-ate. When he states that “…we should have some kind of hand held thing…” Lasse addresses the opportunity of change, and implicitly launches one of his objectives for participating in the project: getting a system that not only supports the central monitoring of maintenance work, but also supports the practical maintenance work “out there” on the shop floor without tying the technicians to a desktop computer back in the office space.
Let me stay for a moment with the encounter at the factory shop
floor at KiMs and the impression of maintenance work practice as it
appeared to my colleagues and to myself as researchers partly sent by
MBS. When returning to the hotel room after half a day in the field,
my colleagues and I made something different out of the footage than
a coherent ethnographic account. The footage consisted in continuous
video recordings of the entire visit (three people with approximately 4 hours of video each). We selected certain sequences for further explo-ration not from a specified list of predefined criteria, but because based on our experience they engaged our immediate interest in making something more out of them. In looking through the tapes it is noted what happens when, as well as any further thoughts evoked by the events. I point to possible criteria for relevant selections, but do bear in mind that they are listed in retrospect, and I make no claims to their general applicability. The sequences we chose illustrated situations that were: recurrent, evoking a sense of the routine; hectic or especially demanding, demonstrating the skill required of the professional; frustrating, pointing to poor support for the task; suc-cessful, possibly providing models for future practices; or problematic, and thus in need of a solution. In the section low-hanging fruit below I will return to the question of what makes a snapshot work well in subsequent design events.
In general we avoided situations that could make the actors look incompetent, sloppy or otherwise compromise their personal or profes-sional integrity openly, since it would provide a very poor basis for continued collaboration. But it is almost always in some sense offen-sive or intimidating to be confronted with one’s own behavior on video.
And the suggestion that a whole team of colleagues, researchers and designers will be watching it closely depends on considerable personal trust towards the researcher.
What I am trying to craft in that hotel room is small ethnographies, or mini-accounts, of the borderland between the known and the possible.
But how do small video clips constitute accounts, and in turn, how do they imbue possible openings for design? The selected sequences become small accounts in themselves in that they refer to particular empirical situations while indicating and depending on a lot of contex-tual information. As such, they become vehicles for articulating differ-ent interests in the field. What makes one choose particular snapshots over others, I maintain, is the degree to which they reflect both it, you, and the audience, whereby they may become accounts. Design anthro-pological accounts do not reflect use practice as much as they present ideas about use practice. Although we are accustomed to representa-tions that locate “the real” in terms of mimesis, the snapshots do not only play out modes of use, they play with modes, leaving actions hanging and unfinished.
The video snapshot named “Personal_task_list.wmv” is one such
account. It displays a situation drawn from my encounter with Lasse
in the workshop area of the factory where he picks up a handwritten list as we pass by his personal work bench:
Lasse: “Now, yesterday, I went around to…uhm write down this list…
There were some things… It was stopped, uhm, the big line over there. They were just running the small line then. Then there were some things that I saw were broken. It was the idea then that I would fix that today. But now they are running the big line, so I just can’t fix it today.”
Joachim: “hmm”
Lasse: “There were some repair switches and things like that, which had to be replaced. Something which…. If they have hit it or something like that...”
Joachim: “A repair what?”
Lasse: “A repair switch. In front of each motor…”
Joachim: “Yes.”
Lasse: “There has to be one of these to turn it off.”
Joachim: “Yes?”
Lasse: “And they clean it with some pretty powerful cleansing agent and the plastic is simply destroyed by it.”
Joachim: “Okay.”
Lasse: “So… It was actually the idea that I would have fixed it today…
but if it should have been really optimal then I should write these things into our maintenance system”
Joachim: “Yes.”
(From video of field situation, January 2005)
About two and a half months after this particular encounter, we succeeded in establishing an appropriate assembly of stakeholders to explore the field material and its potential for design (for a further treatment of the practicalities of carrying out research with partners in industry from this particular project see Pedersen (2007)). With the workshop we set a stage to present our stories from the field in an open-ended format. The idea was to let the snapshots become an opportunity for something else to emerge. The transcript below is from a situation in the workshop, where a group of 6 people have just finished watching the video sequence transcribed above where Lasse showed his handwritten list of tasks. The situation is part of a design game, and it is Palle’s turn to offer a reading of the video sequence:
Palle (service technician): “Well this is his way of collecting repairs and hmm… And maintenance tasks… (Jens laughs). On that paper there…”
Jens (facilitator): “He says something about it being from the day before and… did he not say that?”
(…)
Palle: “Yeah, so this is when he has walked a round while it was run-ning and… And apparently found some things that, hmm… That needed repairs.”
(…)
Jens: “And then he has written that on a piece of paper?”
Palle: “Yes. And…. Yes, I don’t know, but isn’t there an image also where… I mean, we have a… like an…. an uhm… (Palle smiles hesi-tantly and looks toward the chief technology officer) I don’t know if I should say maintenance program, but we do have this list where we type in things on a PC… In Excel, that is, but hmm… Well, it is not quite the optimal solution… But where we actually write the same…”
Jens: “…as he has written on the piece of paper?”
Palle: “Yes. And then we use different color codes to see if it needs to be taken care of here and now, or when it has to be done, or if it is some-thing we are in the middle of, and if it has high priority.”
Jens: “Hmm…”
Riem (facilitator): “So you write the things twice…? Or…?”
Palle: “No... Well, we do if he writes it on a piece of paper to begin with, but then that is because he does not have a PC in his pocket. ” (…)
Jens: “But now we also hear that he does not type it into the system.
What happens then?”
Palle: “Well, then it doesn’t get further than to that note.”
Jens: “no, hehe.”
Palle: “And that’s why it should be typed in so both Claus and we can see what uhm, what he has found out.”
Jens: “Yes.”
(…)
Erik (software developer): “Well, you could say that what is… What is interesting in it is that some things… As I understand it, the line is running, so these are things that he…. While he was doing some other things he found out that these will probably need service. Be-cause it can’t be, I assume, in acute need of service, beBe-cause then the damn thing wouldn’t be running? So it has to be some assumption that unless we change this then we will get down time… on the pro-duction line (…) So it is worth more than gold, if we could capture it, right…?”
(From video of workshop, April 2005)
By bringing the particular video snapshot of the personal task list into
the workshop, our target audience was both the software developers
from MBS and the managers from KiMs in order to present to them
the messy practices of maintenance work, which often differ from
prescribed procedures. Both Lasse and I were deliberately in a
differ-ent work group, so none of the people in this group had been directly involved in producing the video clip, neither in front of nor behind the camera. Yet they all had interest in the topic, and during the design games they were prompted to articulate this interest. Palle is well aware of the situation on the video, which he knows from working with Lasse on an everyday basis. By introducing “this is his way of collecting repairs”, Palle simultaneously acknowledges the problem of not using the shared electronic list as he should, while at the same time refraining from criticizing Lasse for this since he knows only too well how cumbersome it is. In fact Palle takes this as an occasion to express—although he hesitates and looks apologetically at the chief technology officer—that the Excel sheet on the stationary PC is far from an optimal solution, and that it hardly qualifies as a mainte-nance system. The role taken by the facilitator and researcher, Jens, indicates our motivation for showing this clip in the first place. He emphasizes that Lasse did not type in the information on the pc, and prompts for the further consequences of this with the “what happens then?” With this snapshot we wanted to address the tension between the bodily experiences of walking a round, collecting detailed clues as to the current state of the machines versus the demand for structured and formalized information to feed into an ERP system, currently represented by a stationary computer in a back office. Towards the end of the transcript, Erik from MBS tentatively pieces together what must have happened in the actual situation from what he has gotten out of the 40-second-video and the prior conversation. What he lacks in knowledge of maintenance work, he has substantiated in software development skills; as a technology evangelist from MBS, he has a keen eye for the possibility and potential of capturing data by its source. Erik is less than hesitant in pointing out the high value of the information generated by the service technician, and wonders if it could be made available to the maintenance team as a whole—possibly through an ERP system from MBS.
The snapshot with the personal task list constitutes a mini-account in that it reflects both the topic of investigation (maintenance work), the ethnographer’s specialized competence (in seeing practice in relation to formal task descriptions), and the audience (potentially feeding valuable information into the ERP system, and by extension avoiding the ultimate bad: down time of the production line).
The incidents recounted above, where Lasse displays his non-use of
the spreadsheet to me and where the snapshot of his handwritten task
list is interpreted by other project participants, are indicative of the
complexities of representations. With the notion of playful otherness I
try to operationalize the complex set of mirrors in which our identities as project participants are mutually constituted. Instead of a trivial-ized idea of an ethnographer who represents maintenance work to an audience of system developers, playful otherness points to the unsta-ble subject positions of observer and observed. When maintenance work is made available to software developers in video snapshots, the snapshots in turn become the screen to which they project their inter-ests, fantasies and desires concerning the Other. In this regard the fragmentary range of snapshots or mini-accounts become the occasion for articulating a more complex and unsettled image of maintenance work than a singular and coherent account would capture. Playful otherness is an abstract concept for describing an attitude to represen-tations and an ideal state for designerly construction of reciprocal project identities. Now I will move on to introduce two—slightly more concrete—principles that work to achieve a state of playful otherness:
Familiarization and Estrangement.
Familiarization and Estrangement
The strategic idea of creating a window of opportunities by employing the two opposite processes of familiarization and estrangement that I elaborate here was originally developed and published together with Binder and Johansson (Halse, Johansson et al. 2005). To begin with, I will show how the strategy borrows ideas and techniques from an-thropology and dramaturgy.
On the one hand anthropology is about describing the exotic in recognizable terms—it is about familiarizing an audience to seemingly foreign phenomena: “Anthropology has traditionally been dedicated to the cause of contextualizing the exotic and unfamiliar so effectively that it is rendered explicable and unexceptional” (Amit 2000:4). While I certainly do not mean to trivialize this task, it seems to be readily acceptable as a core ethnographic contribution to design: to familiarize designers with the apparently strange practices of “real users”. This is shown in my cases of emergency nursing in a trauma center, the everyday “way home” of a fashion designer, a recruitment consultant and a sales agent, and, finally, service repairs of a production facility.
On the other hand anthropology is no longer defined primarily by the
exoticism of its subject matter; it is increasingly also about casting
new light on the apparently well-known, and about demonstrating the
contingency and curiousness of the most taken for granted routines of
everyday life. The methodological employment of strategic naïvety—
the posing of fundamental questions to which the answer seems to be given—works to destabilize any granted or customary aspects of the given topic, because it is thereby historicized and rendered more or less transitory. When anthropologist Horace Miner published Body Rituals Amongst the Nacirema (1956), his analysis showed that the Nacirema perceived the human body as fundamentally ugly. They purportedly subjected it to routine acts of alteration on an everyday basis through the use of ritual and ceremony. The subject of Miner’s analysis turns out to be not some exotic tribe, but the body culture of the Nacirema spelled backwards. Miner is ironic and playful in his tone, but his piece still works as a de-naturalization of the known; he makes serious points about the alienation of Western bodies, through a momentary dislocation of the reader from trivial bathroom morning routines to more exotic ceremonial practices. Since Miner’s playful piece, ethnography of the apparently well-known, or “anthropology at home”, has become an increasingly serious and widespread genre (e.g.
Cerroni-Long 1995), which makes use of various strategies for casting the subject in a new, estranged, light.
In Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgy (1939), verfremdung works by unexpectedly shifting mode or perspective in order to remove the taken-for-granted, familiar and obvious, and substituting it with the surprising and intriguing. This in turn causes breaks or openings where the “author” can, for example, add something to what is experi-enced, or insert statements to encourage reflection. In theatrical contexts the audience is hereby reminded that what they are witness-ing is not a re-play of some represented reality, but rather a staged occasion for reflecting on what reality might be or mean.
The proposal to pursue an estranged view on “existing practices” runs somewhat counter to the conventional image of the scientific study of users, with the ideal of depicting the user as accurately as possible.
Proposing estrangement as a valuable design anthropological
princi-ple entails a reaction against the general framing of delivering
empa-thetic descriptions of the user as the primary ethnographical task in
design. It is simply not enough to tell a story of “how it really is out
there on the factory floor”, even if the account is both precise and
detailed. As already discussed in chapter one, the exposed subtleties of
how people interact with each other and their artifacts may seem so
delicate and fragile that it becomes difficult to see how any design
intervention could avoid destroying what has been competently built
up over years of practice (for example the London Underground study
by Heath and Luff 1992). Estrangement entails providing the
neces-sary means for refracting familiar images of use, or technology for that
matter. As such estrangement is a key complementary movement to ethnographic familiarization.
As I have shown above, the field encounter is not only a matter of observing use, but also one of establishing a sense of possibility.
Insofar that Lasse’s performance of use is indicative of the observer and my alliance with MBS, he is also observing me. However recipro-cal the encounter was in making it happen, the ability of making it travel to other contexts was presumably enabled most strongly by the video camera held and directed by me. Overall, the field visit was thus positioned as a “we see you”, and as such it was an occasion for the service technicians to direct our seeing.
The subsequent workshop, on the contrary, became an occasion to show the users what we have seen and found important during our visit to their workplace, along the lines of “you see us seeing you”. This is what happens when Palle sees the video snapshot of his colleague’s work practice, as recounted above: It is an opportunity for Palle to see what we were looking for when we visited his workplace; and of course, to respond to this.
In this light design games extend the encouragement to reflex-ively work the self-other hyphen so often evoked in ethnographic methodology. The structure of the collaborative design games serves to extend the investment of interests in the videos by prompting other stakeholders who are not familiar with the situation of use to state what they find in it. As, for example, when the software developer above sees the service technician’s handwritten list of tasks, and thereby finds an occasion for mobilizing his own knowledge of factories in terms of ERP systems and software development. Concretely he sees in the snapshot a highly valued opportunity for capturing data at its source. The mobilization of different interests in the exploration of what fragmentary video snapshots might mean illustrates the double movement of familiarization and estrangement.
The participants with no direct experiences with the field of use were familiarized with maintenance work to an extent where they aptly discussed it with its primary practitioners towards the end of the workshop. The images of use were, on the other hand, fragmen-tary enough that they did not convey a coherent account of what maintenance work is. The whole setup of presenting use through paper cards on a game board forces the participating users to view their practice in a new light; it forces them to see themselves through the lens of the current design event.
One of the reasons to meet is to familiarize one another with the
areas of the other’s expertise. It could be tempting to suggest that we
do that first—we get on the same page and establish a common under-standing of the domain and its problems, but this implies an untena-bly rational fit between the existing and the possible. Playful otherness is about exploring them simultaneously as they develop in mutually dependent ways. The workshop situation recounted in chapter two, where Helle and the interaction designer discuss the way Rickard handles his multiple electronic devices, is a case in point. It would have been tempting to place Helle in the group dealing with her own practices, and Rickard in the group dealing with his practices to get things straightened out, instead of the other way around. But we specifically wanted to avoid a situation where the authoritative voice of a user, who had actually been there in the situation on video, would appear in the role as final arbiter and thus prevent a more generative exploration of what the situation could have been like. And as the discussion played out, it did make sense to explore Rickard’s device handling in terms of the craftwork of Helle, a fashion designer, who spreads out clips of cloth on a table to look, feel and compare: “Yes, Rickard does it too, just a bit more digitally. He uses various digital media thrown out on a table. He has a different way of succeeding with it…. With his mobile phone, computer, PDA etc…” (From video of workshop 2, October 2002).
In aiming for playful otherness, design games aim to reflect and
refract one set of interests in the image of another, while also shifting
out the positions of self and other. This means that the images to be
othered, subjected to a familiarized or estranged gaze, are not only
that of the users, but just as much that of various groups of designers
and their respective fields of competence. In the sections below on
design workshops as ritual and the choreography thereof I will provide
an example of a Duplofication of SonyEricsson technology as part of a
workshop in the COMIT project. By representing various technologies
from existing electronic products as sticky labels on Lego Duplos, they
were deconstructed, decontextualized and essentially estranged. While
the Duplofication forced the technology designers to re-open the
question of what their products could be, it simultaneously constituted
a familiarization of the participating users with complex technologies
and production techniques which they where hereby enabled to
simu-late and discuss themselves, simply by assembling Lego blocks.
Vis-à-vis the snapshots from the field, the presentation of electronic
prod-ucts as Lego Duplos on a game board forces the technical experts to
see their products through the lens of the current design event, and
not take regular categories for granted.
Familiarization and estrangement are principles to achieve a state of playful otherness, where the ontological status of the designed-for field and the available technological resources can be sufficiently destabilized to be re-invented. At the same time the participants are familiar enough with each others’ fields of expertise that they can sensitively and meaningfully engage in a mutual re-invention of realities.
To the extent that this state is achieved, it qualifies my overall characterization of the design anthropological endeavor as one of portraying the culture of use in terms of the culture of design. Al-though I mean this as a general characterization of the overall en-deavor, it might be possible to illustrate it with the concrete example from above, where Lasse shows us his task list. By the unfolding of the video snapshot we—as outsiders—are first required to imagine a culture of use: where taking care of big industrial machinery is de-pendent on finding time slots where they are not required to be run-ning, and where intimate knowledge of small parts, such as repair switches threatened by strong cleansing agents, is crucial for assess-ing their remainassess-ing operatassess-ing time and the overall state of the ma-chinery. But this little story of an occurrence in a production facility on Funen is not just that. In the end we recognize a general concern for system development: the list is not entered into the maintenance system. A difference is hereby posited between the particular practice of maintenance work and the generic concern for making information available for computation. Yet the very story transcends the difference in addressing this particular audience. The conditions of its meaning-fulness lie as much in the audience of system developers as in its topic of maintenance work, which resembles a point made by Clifford about ethnographic allegories in general (1986). The bulk of the empirical snapshots employed in the three recounted projects here describe explicitly some aspects of “foreign” use practice, whereas the story is held together and made familiar by reference to particular designerly frames of interpretation.
Collaborative Occasions for Re-inventing Realities
It has been long acknowledged in the industry that regarding complex
products and services that often involve several diverse organizations
and industries, such as mobile IT systems, creative thinking and
innovation in general are more likely to occur where different
compe-tencies and practices of design, development and use intersect, than
when they remain separate in their respective silos. There are not,
however, many well-established practices in industry for meeting this demand for heterogeneous collaboration, which on a practical and tangible level can accommodate concrete use practices, technological possibilities, and diverse stakeholders with different competencies and interests at the same time. With the practice of framing and re-framing a problematic situation in complex organizational setups, the engagement of various and often diverse stakeholders in the design process becomes an important design task in itself.
Just as it requires a lot of work to construe sites as potential con-texts for the use of hypothetical design artifacts, such as the factory shop floor or the trauma center, so too does it require a lot of work to construe a site for a collaborative workshop. What has to be done to establish a site where a fashion designer as an unpaid individual and a professional interaction designer from SonyEricsson can be brought together and engage in collaborative exercises to explore future possi-bilities for mobile services? Or a smith from KiMs can be brought together with a software programmer from Microsoft and engage in a design dialogue about features for mobile maintenance systems? It is not a trivial task to establish these dialogues.
The creation of a space and format that facilitates momentary in-tersections of diverse interests was an explicit research topic in the Space Studio as expressed in the notion of “partner-engaged design”
(for example described in Johansson, Fröst et al. 2002), which I have continued to explore. In the COMIT project it played out the challenge of bringing together competencies of providing infrastructure for wireless communication, of manufacturing the actual hardware of mobile terminals, of delivering content on portable devices, and of developing systems for digital pens and paper—competencies which resided in the separate organizations of SonyEricsson, Anoto, Decuma and Telia. It is no coincidence that these organizations were brought together to meet over their potential end-users represented by Helle, Rickard and Ronny, which became the place where the rubber hits the road: where the technological interplay meets social practice. In the project Mobility in Maintenance, the challenge was that of bringing together the developers of global enterprise resource planning sys-tems, their partner who customizes these systems to meet local needs, the customer organization, and finally “the man on the floor”, con-cretely represented by Microsoft Business Solutions, Thy:Data, KiMs and the two service technicians Lasse and Palle respectively.
Hughes et al (2000) have explored a related aspect of the issue
when they experimented with a desktop software application for the
interpretation of material from fieldwork which emphasized particular
perspectives on the material:
…the adoption of a technique based on viewpoints allows us to present information in a form that makes explicit the different but complemen-tary interests involved in the design and implementation process and thereby provides the starting point for developing fruitful communica-tion between designers, users and researchers, since the presentacommunica-tion of these different viewpoints allows alternative views and perspectives to be set beside each other as a resource.
(Hughes, O'Brien et al. 2000:195)
I am generally aligned with the ambition of employing in design an ethnographic sensitivity to differences in positions and perspectives, but I have a few reservations. The language bias of the approach is limiting; manipulating text on a screen does not necessarily work very well for stakeholders more geared towards tangible manipulation of artifacts. The desktop computing interface necessitates individual control of the actions, and thereby becomes an obstacle for a more collaborative exploration. Finally, the approach rests on an ambition to identify and represent actors’ relationships to the design situation and each other, so that “inconsistencies and conflicts between them can be avoided” (Hughes, O'Brien et al. 2000:195), which, in its realist epistemology, is more oriented towards scientific rationales of know-ing them than towards designerly rationales of makknow-ing somethknow-ing new of them.
Instead of a describe-and-eliminate strategy with regard to po-tential conflicts between various stakeholders, I find it more fruitful to create occasions for conflicts to play out, not as external “perspectives”
on the design situation, but as inherently integral elements of the concrete interactions of the stakeholders. If the stakeholders can be assembled and brought to do something together, as in collaboratively reframing what a particular image from the field material might mean, the negotiation and aligning of their varying interests in it has already been initiated. Obviously this is not an elimination of differ-ences in interest, but it requires the creation of an assembly and entails a momentary intersection of interest, which I will try to illus-trate now.
Creating Assemblies
In the introduction to the edited volume Making Things Public
(Latour and Weibel 2005) Latour challenges the conventional
concep-tion from science and politics that objects are matters-of-fact
(trans-parent and undisputable) and distinguishable from assertions
(disputable opinions). Latour suggests that we substitute this false
dichotomy with the integrating notion matters-of-concern,
encompass-ing both the material aspect of thencompass-ings and the political aspect of
opinions.
14He reminds us that thing is etymologically related to the Nordic folketing, which points to an intimate relationship between people gathering to debate political issues and the issues they gather to address. The point is that things may bring people together because they divide them. The resurrected word thing designates thus “both those who assemble because they are concerned as well as what causes their concerns and divisions” (Latour 2005:23).
The process of making things public through conflicting assem-blies shares some similarity with partner-engaged design, where project stakeholders are invited to gather in a material exploration of design materials. Latour is concerned with democratic aspects of political assemblies over material matters. While there is not neces-sarily any political obligations towards democracy in collaborative design, the basis for comparison lies in the participatory challenge of articulating diverse interests in the subject matter.
The participants in our design workshops do not assemble be-cause they agree or wish to fuse together, but bebe-cause divisive matters of concern have brought them into an out-of-the-ordinary place in order to generate “some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement”, to paraphrase Latour (2005:23).
In order to clarify what is entailed in the creation of a space and format that facilitates momentary intersections of diverse interests, let us follow Latour and break it down to three related processes:
bringing in the relevant parties, bringing in the relevant issues, and devising ways that enable them to connect.
Defining the relevant parties is a prerequisite for bringing them in, and is usually central to the process of project establishment.
Professional contacts, coincidental meetings and extended networks are often highly influential in singling out concrete sets of relations of interest to delimit each project, and thereby determining the central setup of stakeholders. In the case of Mobility in Maintenance, the project was initiated after a program manager from MBS attended a public research presentation event at ITU and happened to come across my little stand. The factory KiMs was enrolled as a “case”, because of a previous successful collaboration with MBS, and finally Thy:Data entered the project at a point where it had originally been planned to end. I will not go further into the changing relations of interest. Having defined the relevant parties, it is a challenge in itself
14 It is striking to note how social science has witnessed an overwhelming renewed interest in materiality, for example (Brown 2004; Dant 2005; Latour and Weibel 2005; Verbeek 2005), while design has moved away from a focus primarily on material objects, to include social processes, services, policies and experiences as areas of concern, especially through the notion of “design thinking”.
to actually bring in the relevant parties. The meticulous task of mak-ing sure people from three, four, or five different organizations turn up at a certain time in a certain place is overwhelmingly frustrating given its apparent simplicity: endless exchanges of emails, phone conversations and meetings regarding suggested dates, postponed dates, cancelled appointments, holidays etc. The difficulties with coordinating the major workshop events for all project members had to do with participants who operate under different organizational regimes—as researchers we simply lacked the managerial authority across organizations to make sure our appointment would remain a high priority in facing everybody’s common calendrical cluttering and re-scheduling.
Bringing in the relevant issue: Through a range of design mate-rials consisting of, for example, ethnographic video snapshots, cultural probing kits, representations of technological functions and features, and tangible shapes to represent form factors, the relevant issue is brought in. Below I will show concretely how this was done.
Finally the challenge is to set up the issue as an occasion for gathering and devise ways through which the assembled parties may attach themselves to it as they articulate their interests, and, if suc-cessful, generate possible directions for its re-invention. Design games are powerful physical devices through which the abstract phenomenon of not-yet-existing design artifacts and the equally ephemeral phe-nomenon of users of not-yet-existing products may be articulated and negotiated. In other words, design games provide opportunities for the assembled parties to connect to the issue that brought them together.
Below I shall describe in some detail how design games do this.
But first I will argue that imposing a ritual structure in the per-formance of the workshop is a way of inducing ceremonial effective-ness and a state of liminality, wherein the ontological status of the issue is destabilized and prepared for transformation.
Design Openings through Liminality
Both ritual and design workshop seek to explore and inflict certain changes in the world. They seek to initiate these changes through actions in a different order of reality, an order that is ex-situ—
somehow outside the everyday life that it seeks to change. In the following I will treat the design workshop as if it sought its efficacy through the same means as ritual.
The design ritual is in part performed as a material workshop, as
an occasion for manipulating matter. Some elements of the subject
matter are brought into the workshop in symbolic form, such as use
practice as it looks today (represented by video snapshots) or advanced
technological functions (represented by text printed on labels), or interaction modes (represented by generic cardboard shapes or pieces of foam). As preparation for the design workshop, particular identities are here symbolically turned into general matter. The process of stripping away details of the particular elements, until they are rendered manipulatable in the abstract, is structurally similar to the process of metaphorically dissolving the identity of a neophyte and associating him/her with, for example, the earth—the generalized matter into which all life is eventually subsumed. In workshop prepa-ration this process of abstraction prepares the establishment of the liminality of the design ritual by destabilizing conventional classifica-tions, and lifting familiar entities out of their known context. So far the destructive aspects of the liminal: In the design workshop as well as in ritual, these go hand in hand with re-constructive aspects of the liminal: “Undoing, dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by processes of growth, transformation and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns” (Turner 1996:514). Metaphorically, earth is also the general matter out of which everything is re-born. Likewise, the children’s building blocks, the game pieces on the game boards and the scenario props partially take on the qualities of general matter out of which new particular forms may be articulated; but only partially, because their links to concrete realities have not been com-pletely severed, merely loosened enough to enable new links to emerge. About the re-constructive aspects of liminality, Turner wrote that it may be regarded “as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (Turner 1996:512).
Both rites of passage and design workshops are intense events
confined in time and space, with a special orientation towards
transi-tion and transformatransi-tion. One of the goals of the design workshop is to
establish a space, which resembles in function that of the liminal
period: “the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain
freedom to juggle with the factors of existence” (Turner 1996:521). The
workshop participants’ ability to engage intensively with the issue in a
short period of time is dependent on the particular setup of a locale as
a performance space. This is the case for an enactment session on the
factory shop floor as for the current concern: the workshop. The
par-ticular locale may be the everyday workplace of designers, the studio,
as was the case in COMIT, or foreign locations such as a client’s
meeting room as was the case in Mobility in Maintenance and Flexible
Treatment Rooms. The point is that they are appropriated and
ar-ranged especially for the event to create a place that is experientially
out of the ordinary. Simple modifications can transform the meeting
room into a performance space: arranging the participants in a
circu-lar shape around a stage, for example. The varying importance of space is articulated by the deployment of props and elements. Given that we are to play board games, the table for example, is populated by artifacts that invite touching, moving, turning over.
There are, of course, limits to the liberty implied in liminality.
When the time is up and the event is over, the spell is lifted and the participants return to their everyday order. In successful rites of passage, the neophyte returns from the liminal phase to become once again subject to custom and law, although in a different state. In design events transforming the state of the subject matter is usually not accomplished by the end of the event. The workshop, for example, has only a “soft” final phase of reintegration. Instead of ending the design event with a summary of decisions and conclusions that would close down the event, some aspects of possible practice are left hang-ing betwixt and between.
The liminality in design ritual is not just a liberty. It is also a demand to reinvent a workable order of things. At the beginning of the workshop, the participants are confronted with ambiguity and para-dox and with a confusion of customary categories: RFID scanners and Lego Duplos, traumatized patients and game pieces. A creative force driving the event forward is the struggle of the participants to collabo-ratively work their way out of this ambiguity and the partly dissolved order. The collaborative aspect of articulating the qualities of the new state of the subject matter in public display is prominent in design workshops as it is in rites of passage whose efficacy is dependant on what Turner termed communitas (Turner 1969). In the design work-shop communitas describes the transformation of the audience from a collection of separate individuals (or representatives of organizations) into a group of participants collectively addressing a task. One of the goals of the design game is the temporary dissolution of boundaries that keep people separate—to move from distinct groups of stakeholders to a collectively achieving group.
The design workshop is a performance towards the actual; it is
not content to manipulate only symbols or that which remains in
potentia. In line with my discussion of the design workshop as a
performance, it could be a point of objection that the changes played
through by the performing participants affect very few people,
com-pared to the number of actual users of e.g. SonyEricsson mobile
phones. However, the design workshop depends on a recall to powers
larger than the audience. During the workshop the powers of the
project’s extended networks are invoked, some of which are in fact
capable of realizing the changes on a very large scale, should they
wish to.
Most ritual action depends on metaphorical links:
Relationships are likened to paths, nets and bonds, understanding is thought of as a coming into the light, ignorance is equated with dark-ness, freedom with the flight of a bird, dilemmas with knots, persons with places, and the human body with the body of the land. In ritual these links provide a means of acting, for by manipulating the accessible and sayable element in the symbolic equation one can change the way one experiences the more elusive, unmanageable and ineffable element.
(Jackson 2005:81)
Similarly, the design games seek to manipulate by proxy that which in the course of everyday life seem to be insurmountable challenges.
One of the ways through which the design workshop seeks to produce new visions for the future is to transform how we see the world of today. Through playing with words, objects and images we seek to change our experience of the situations in which we find ourselves. Lévi-Strauss, in his famous essay on the effectiveness of symbols, examined a situation from the Cuna Indians where a difficult child-birth was facilitated by a shaman’s spell. However fascinating, I shall refrain from recounting the story here, but limit myself to cite Lévi-Strauss’ explanation of the apparent effectiveness of the spell:
“The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed” (1963:198). The effectiveness of symbols lies, in other words, in their power to make us think differently about our relationship to a task at hand. With the woman’s changed experience of her difficult situation, she is induced with an ability to overcome her pain and exhaustion.
Faced with the risk of taking this allegory between design work-shops and rituals too far, I should hasten to also mention their un-likeness. I do not intend to say that a design game is about expressing psychic states. Compared to rites of passage that often follow strict conventions, and where the context is well-known to the participants who usually know each other, the collaborative design workshop is different. Each project is unique in its subject matter, scope and ambitions, thus the scene for reflection and re-creation has to be set anew each and every time. In exploratory design rituals the character-istics of the new state is fundamentally unknown and subject to experimentation, whereas in rites of passage the new state of the neophyte is usually a well-described and codified socio-cultural role:
initiation is a drama of restoration, not of inventing the new.
Fur-thermore, the language of the old, the intermediate and the new state
inherited from van Gennep implies a structuralist description of a momentary transition. Schechner and Turner describe two relatively stable states (state 1 and 2) that are bridged by the performance of a transitory event such as a rite of passage. In contrast, I suggest that in light of performativity in its broader ontological scope, the process could just as well be understood the other way around. Through various performances in a transitory event, be that a rite of passage or a participatory design workshop, the ever-evolving practices of the subjects are reified in representations and thus constituted as “exist-ing practice” (state 1), and by delegat“exist-ing interests and concerns to material artifacts such as scenarios, mockups and ceremonial proto-cols, the “future practice” (state 2) is established. However, neither state is unambiguous; their distinction has to be continually re-enforced, and this in turn constitutes the event as transitory. The future workshop is a performance of the new, but it is itself consti-tuted by the very distinction of the new and the old.
I do however, wish to draw on the idea that when rituals play-fully re-present an intransigent aspect of the lifeworld on a reduced scale, the involved participants may be enabled to manipulate and, to a certain degree, master it. The study of rituals and symbols has demonstrated the remarkable human capacity to create a simulacrum of lived or imagined events which can then be invoked and consciously deployed in ways that everyday reality could not be. The process of affording us opportunities to replay or anticipate real events through objects, words and images that re-present those events is what I wish to show with the comparison between the shamanistic spell and design games. When effective, both religious symbols and future scenarios work by fusing the “lived-in” with the “thought-of” order.
To sum up this section, liminality is a temporary state out-of-the-ordinary, where established categories are suspended. I suggest that imposing a ritual structure in the performance of the workshop is a way of inducing a state of liminality, wherein the ontological status of the issue of concern is destabilized and prepared for transformation in a process that resembles that of rites of passage. In the design ritual, symbols and activities work to create design openings through liminal-ity. The subject matter of the design workshop, mobility in mainte-nance for example is momentarily rendered open for re-invention:
betwixt and between. It is neither maintenance work as usual, neither
is it future maintenance work enhanced by mobile IT, yet it is both.
Workshop Choreography
Let us take a look at how the design workshops of the three projects are composed and arranged with regard to actions, participants, rules and materials—in short, their choreography. In order to establish the workshop as a playful moment out of the ordinary, a liminal space, it is highly rule-bound and makes conscious use of a wealth of tech-niques.
A concurrent feature of the workshops is that they attempt to es-tablish three different modes of action: grounding, staging and evok-ing.
15Grounding has to do with familiarizing oneself with various fragments of reality from the design situation; with nurturing com-mitment through peeks into the sometimes intimate field encounters;
and with setting constraints for the further design exploration. Stag-ing has to do with settStag-ing a particular scene and sketchStag-ing out the contours of a landscape; it entails herein a focusing from the more scattered mode of grounding. Evoking has to do with populating the landscape with plausible elements and letting them take on a life, partly of their own. Although grounding, staging and evoking may be seen as sequential in their logic, they do not represent distinct phases.
They work as figures for thought, guiding the choreography of ele-ments in a particular workshop.
Workshops can take place in almost any location, as long as the space and furniture can be arranged for two types of social activity:
undisturbed intense group work in small circles, and a larger area for collective gathering and display. There are many ways of establishing the workshop as special, as out-of-the-ordinary, in relation to the everyday context of the participants, but the physical location of the workshop is the most obvious. I have treated this extensively else-where (Halse 2003), and will not go into detail with it here. As I will show, it is important to make the participants feel secluded during the group work in order to encourage them to take chances and experi-ment with roles and design ideas; it is equally important to create a center of public attention for the moments of display.
The opening of a workshop serves to establish it as a common platform for diverse interests in the design situation. In the second workshop of COMIT, for example, my colleague Jörn introduced the motivation for the project and the workshop:
15 These three related notions were developed collectively among researchers in the Space Studio.
We try to increase the feeling of continuity in the use of IT as there are more and more mobile units that are connected with various infrastruc-tures for communication. And you also move through continuously changing environments… All of a sudden it gets really unclear what we are designing for. When we talk about mobile units we never know in what situations they will end up.
(From video of workshop, October 2002)
Here Jörn introduces the workshop as an opportunity to tackle the problem of designers who master complicated technology, but with limited knowledge as to the social contexts they design for. He also acted as a master of ceremony—one who holds special knowledge to explain the detailed rules of the design games, and who will make sure that they are followed—in presenting the programme of the workshop and the three design games we were to play in three distinct sessions: the theme game, the technology game and the scenario game.
By introducing the participants and their backgrounds, the individual areas of expertise and the organizational resources they represent were thereby announced as a collective resource for the following design session.
Before progressing with the overall workshop choreography, let me demonstrate the tangible character of the design games employed.
Brandt has suggested to understand the role of exploratory design games as one of organizing participation in participatory design projects (2006), and in line with this I will render them as central techniques in enabling the participants in a very short time to juggle realities, particular concerns, more generic constraints and a multi-plicity of perspectives.
Design games are playful exercises carried out in groups during workshops with the goal of collective sense-making organized as board games with game pieces. They are driven by collaboration and nego-tiation rather than competition. The design materials provided for the workshop are all introduced through the games. I have already treated the short video clips extensively, so let me just comment briefly on the snapshot aesthetics before moving on to other kinds of game pieces. By the very act of being video recorded, everyday objects and experiences are singled out as being worthy of attention. The snapshot aesthetics, as evident in Figure 13, invite a more performa-tive reception due to their unfinished character than any of the re-lated genres of user study reports, ethnographic monographies, or video documentaries. My use of video as an evocative design material rather than evidence is directly influenced by Buur, Binder et al.
(2000). Video cards offer themselves as general matter out of which
new forms can articulated: They invite to literally inscribe new mean-ings onto their white areas; and their foot stands opens up for their tangible re-positioning in new relations of meaning.
Let us return to the overall choreography and the collective introduc-tion to the workshop, where resources are lined-up in the form of personal expertise, home organizations, and the various design mate-rials. Overall, a playful mode of exploration is encouraged, for exam-ple, by setting the time frame for the produced scenarios to four years from now. Let me qualify this particular marking of the desired hori-zon for imagination. We seek to avoid an extreme sense of futurism, where a portable battery can be imagined to provide the energy of a present-day nuclear plant, or where the stakeholders’ image of self is generalized into an abstract us humans without distinct group inter-ests, whereby the design space risks to appear featureless and without constraints. On the other hand, the desired horizon for imagination is cast far enough to avoid stakeholders designing merely for themselves and their immediate needs of tomorrow, in the vein of it would be nice to get a new computer, whereby the constraints of the design space may resist any attempt at unsettling them. Our goal has been to try and set the horizon within middle range, where individual preferences are subsumed in group interests, and imagined products are within technological reach.
The following design sessions are carried out in smaller groups of 3-6 people, which allow for a more direct hands-on exploration of the design materials and a more intimate style of interaction. There is a
Figure 13: Video snapshots of nursing practice used as game pieces in a design game. During the game the players impose their interpretations on the pieces through writing notes on them and placing them in physical proximity or
strong element of rehearsal in the first sessions. Participants are unfamiliar with the format of playing, as well as with the content of the games representing the specific design situation. The rehearsal is an opportunity for great variation and experimentation, both with finding out how the game is appropriately played and with regard to what kinds of manipulations of design material can be brought to make sense. There is a lot of “noise” in the sense of tentative connec-tions between various elements—for example a particular video snapshot and a particular technological component—that turn out to fall apart again. If we return to the design space metaphor of the landscape, there is a lot of “looking around” and the movements are hesitant and incoherent.
After having viewed a video snapshot of Helle in her shop where she complains to her friend about the aesthetics of an advertisement in a local newspaper, the workshop participants try to make sense of the video. But they are bothered that it does not give away its story.
Confronted with ambiguity and paradox the players are silent. Two of them sat with their arms crossed and looked down when Erik (senior usability specialist) gives up: “is it something where her products are presented or what…? No, we will have to ask…” While Erik indicates that Helle—who is working next door in another group—can provide the true story herself, the intention of the game is to force the players to actively making sense of the displayed situations.
When the group discusses Helle’s dislike of mobile phones,
an-swering machines, text messages and the like, they watch a video with
her little book of customer phone numbers and email addresses lying
on the counter in her shop. In this video Ronny (recruitment
consult-ant, participating as “himself”) sees something he has been looking
for: “Here I just felt for the first time that she gives in to the
informa-tional; there is a certain power of business, even in her situation,
right?” Ronny is tentative in launching his reading of the video.
De-spite Helle’s explicit claims that she is indifferent about missing a
phone call or a message, Ronny posits that there is a tension between
the style of not caring and the desire to make the most out of business
opportunities for her fashion shop. Up until this point Ronny has been
skeptical as to Helle’s disregard for being available for potential
customer calls, and the workshop group has not produced any lasting
interpretations of the materials. When Ronny sees this clip, he
im-poses his own awareness of the importance of being available to
customers, and thereby establishes a concrete and personal relation to
Helle’s practice. A moment thereafter Ronny steps out of the game
and the role of interpreting player to suggest that the group write
down some of what is said. Stopping the act to make comments or
suggestions to the format, style or phrasing is characteristic also of actors rehearsing a performance (Schechner 202-208). The proposition to capture the dialogue in the design game suggests that something important has just been said.
By working their way through many video snapshots, images and statements from more or less unrelated situations in Helle’s everyday life, the players gain a familiarity that serves as grounding for the subsequent scenario building. The blurred appearance of a goal in the design material transforms the mode of working, from that of tenta-tively looking in many directions to one of more consistently trying to add to something which is being built. In fact the tension between Helle’s reckless style and need for professional customer care indi-cated by Ronny’s statement has begun to evolve among the players as something to be explored more intently. Through continued rehears-als, the group works their way out of the partly dissolved order; in doing that they also themselves change from a collection of individuals to a collectively acting group: communitas, in Turner’s term.
Two hours later the group has begun to develop a future scenario around Helle’s ability to get in contact (in style) with customers who pass by the window to her show room of fashion design:
Amanda (interaction designer): “…so that it is not forced upon anyone.”
Ronny: “No, exactly, it is on the customer’s conditions—the conditions of the observer.”
Amanda: “They should be able to leave their information for her. Like you do when you sign up on a webpage…”
Ronny: “How would you make contact, when you address Helle through the show room window? … Maybe they are just interested in making the first contact: ‘I would like to know more… who are you, I could be interested in knowing if you can design what I want’…”
Erik (senior usability specialist): “What do we need to set that up?”
Ronny: “Couldn’t we just put up the phone outside…?” (Everybody laughs)
(From video of workshop, October 2002)
Despite the laughter and the tentative design moves, their way of
working with the material is now more coherent. The move from
rehearsal in the working groups to collective display later entails a
transformation of incoherent and individual clusters of meaning into
composed sequences. The group is still in rehearsal mode, but slowly
getting ready to present their scenario to the other groups. We see
how the group is working simultaneously on both their understanding
of the communication between Helle and her customers, the business
potential in supporting it, and the technology needed to do that.
The group has also begun to set a concrete scene, i.e. they are ac-tively staging an imaginary situation of Helle’s life now. By piecing together different fragments of her practice and filling in the gaps by imagination, they sketch the contours of a coherent landscape of her shop, showroom, the street, and her working area in the back; they have begun to populate it with a customer who passes by, and a first tentative “outside phone”, which gets elaborated in technical terms later.
If we compare this situation to the earlier one, where they are frustrated that the storyline is not in the snapshots themselves, they have now accepted to build the story themselves. And furthermore, their work with the scenario has moved into a more evocative mode.
They have drawn the contours of the landscape so well that the man passing by is now getting a voice (“I could be interested in knowing if you can design what I want”), and this process where the elements of the design space begin to take on a life of their own, a life that was not evident in any of the individual elements or players before, is what we refer to as evoking.
To ensure a committed exploration of the design situation and to accommodate the various interests in the project, it is important to elicit an initial articulation of concerns from the participating stakeholders in preparation of the workshop. Crafting performative representations of the design situation is thus not limited to the field of potential use, but includes also the concerns of other project part-ners, for example the developers of information technology. A situa-tion to be avoided is where a design artifact has been produced during a collaborative workshop, and then afterwards one of the central stakeholders insist that this or that feature that was never discussed during the workshop be included in the concept design. This would be a failure of the collaborative and participative aspects of the approach, which is dependent on an open and mutual commitment to bringing one’s interests in the project to the table.
In the projects COMIT and Mobility in Maintenance we spent quite an effort in pushing the partners in the IT industry to reveal to us a list of technological functions or features invested with particular interest from their company. To provide a few examples from COMIT:
chat, direct written communication with one or more users over the
internet; wireless control of other device; pay for a service directly from
bank account; redirect phone calls to other device suited for voice
communication; draw or sketch in an open format, like on a sketch
board. Although to varying degree these elements may seem dated or
trivial in the present context, they were considered promising for the near future of mobile IT in COMIT.
The Technology Game took its departure from a ritual deconstruction of various actual IT products manufactured by the partner organiza-tions, such as a mobile phone, digital pen and paper, a PDA, an mp3-player etc. Rather than working with these finished products, we symbolically decomposed each of them into their functioning parts as listed above. Accordingly, the game material included a set of techno-logical functions and features, which were printed on labels. This de-composition added to establishing the design workshop as a liminal space, in that it destabilized the conventional expectations surround-ing for example a mobile phone. Dursurround-ing re-constructive phase of the game each player devised a new technology composite that could be brought to match a theme or challenge from the field material. The technology composites were assembled by putting together several Lego Duplo bricks with printed function labels on. The proposed technology composite was placed on the game board together with the theme or challenge from the design situation it addressed.
The “Duplofication” of technology works in one and the same time as familiarizing users with technological possibilities through the simplification of complex issues, and as estranging the technical experts from their company’s own products. The Technology Game thus works both to enable non-technical experts in entering the dia-logue about what the given technologies may mean, and to avoid that the collaboration with users is taken as an occasion of mere product
Figure 14: A player constructs from Lego Duplo bricks and sticky labels a technology composite in The Technology Game in COMIT. The preparation of these game pieces entailed a deconstruction of the industrial partners’ established electronic products into generic functions and features, which could then be reassembled in new ways during the design game. The image to the right shows also ad-hoc “features” such as personal profile added by a player on the spot.
placement: the technical experts are forced to rethink their products through the articulation of the basic technological qualities in terms of user practice.
In Totemism (1991) Lévi-Strauss concluded that the emblematic use of things and creatures as totems, is based on the simple fact that the people who use them find them good to think with. Lévi-Strauss points to the usefulness of things for conceiving and manipulating social relationships which is a relevant observation in the context of design games. I would like to stress that there is not necessarily a privileged focus on the cognitive aspect of things to think with. In fact, in design games thinking and rethinking of the design situation is not above, behind or below the physical tinkering with design materials, but inextricably connected and on the same plane. It makes as much sense to turn the relation around and suggest thoughts to tinker with as things to think with; a point I think Lévi-Strauss would agree on with respect to totemism as well.
From this look at examples of technological elements as game pieces, let us return to the presentation round towards the end of the second workshop in COMIT. The four people from the group working with material from Helle’s life stand up in front of the other groups, who form an audience. Posters are hung on the wall to illustrate the four scenarios produced by this group, and they present one each. Ronny steps forward and looks at Helle, who is in the audience:
Ronny: “—a nice instrument in the relation between you as a designer and the customer: You get an idea… You have a customer who has placed this order for a garment that looks like this (gesticulating with his hands), and when you work with it, then you get this idea…
An inspiration that you are not quite sure the customer will appreci-ate. Then you take a photo of this detail of it. And send off the image as a suggestion…. —a suggestion of this change, and ask for feedback from the customer.” (Ronny hesitates and turns around to look at the poster)
Ronny: “That’s what it is about, in a compressed version.”
(From video of workshop, October 2002)
The spotlight and performance for an audience has here helped the
group to transform their incoherent and individual interpretations in
the first rehearsals into this much more composed sequence. The
scenario is not very developed with regard to technological
specifica-tions, but it displays how their rehearsals have enabled them to
perform Helle’s everyday life with fashion design and customers quite
competently and self consciously; and it indicates how information
technology might bring different relationships about between fashion designer and customer (and many other possible transformations of relationships as evident in the other scenarios). As it turns out in a later project stage, this scenario is evocative enough that a series of other scenarios spring from it when we enact it with Helle in her actual show room; among these the future scenario “Displaying the new collection” illustrated in chapter two. The workshop as a design ritual initiated these changes through actions in a different order of reality, an order that was ex-situ; somehow outside the everyday life that it sought to change.
We shall now leave the COMIT project and turn to a situation from the project Flexible Treatment Rooms. The design games at the first workshop with the trauma nurses and their superiors, as seen for example in Figure 15, had resulted in these themes: pause, the staff’s wellbeing, reception, professional activities, patient, control, communi-cation, organization, workarounds, and daylight.
By retreating to the design studio after the workshop and re-working the impressions and the results into eight new themes, we imposed a designerly interpretation more distanced from the immedi-ate interpretations of the empirical mimmedi-aterial. Appropriating and working with the material in temporary retreat is not only a dominat-ing act of adoption and adaption; it is also a catalyst for dialogue and opportunity. While it turns the images of the nurses’ work practice into something new which does not readily match the nurses’ own account of their work, it casts their recognizable work practices in a new light; an estranged light, which seeks to make room for the designerly interest and desire for improvement in and through this
Figure 15: Design game from workshop 1, where empirical snapshots are sorted according to their level of importance and how well the depicted situations are taken to work.
new set of fragmented concerns with emergency treatment. These are three of the new themes:
On stage: Where one is in action; in contact with patients and their relatives; where there is emergency. Outlook: A way of positioning one-self obtaining an overview, aware of local events and colleagues, but ori-ented towards the more distant monitoring of remote sites of accidents and incoming ambulances. Shield: The patients’ need for protection from curiosity and voyeurism, the need for privacy and coping with dramatic experiences; and the staff’s need for exclusively professional areas.
In workshop 2 these themes were taken as the starting point in a series of three design games, of which I will go into some detail with the two last ones. The first task for the players was to try and relate the empirical snapshots of their own nursing practice to the themes provided by us. The result of this first game was a series of clusters:
snapshots grouped around themes and prepared as new game pieces in themselves for the subsequent game.
The second board game was played by two groups in parallel; one group played on a scale floor plan of a residential house, the other on a scale floor plan of a theater (game board number two and three from the left in figure 18 and 19). The challenge was to employ the game board as the metaphorical floor plan of the Trauma Center and its current practices—in such a concrete way that for example one could not see around corners—and then arrange it with the previously discussed particular situations, zones of activities and types of
equip-Figure 16: Scale floor plans of a residential house and a theater prepared as design game boards.
ment and furniture represented by various game bricks. Let us see what happens when we suggest the nurses to think of the Trauma Center as a residential house. Here Mads is placing a video card of a nurse measuring a patient’s blood pressure (which has been discussed in the previous game) in the children’s room of the house:
Mads: (nurse) “Then I will place it here, where the need for close obser-vation is… Where you are on stage and very alert and… And can feel that the colleagues are sometimes far away.”
(…)
Inge: (chief nurse) “I think it could make a lot of sense to gather a func-tion in the middle (points to the hallway) and then have all the pa-tient flows out here… (Gesticulates with her hands around the periphery of the game board) …like a dome, or I don’t know… (Forms a dome with her hands on top of the hallway) It’s an image that is coming to my mind, visually… A transparent vault here… or what-ever… With outlook and exits to various rooms...” (Points to the bathroom, the bedroom, the children’s room, the kitchen, and the din-ing and livdin-ing room)
(…)
Inge: “Whoop, now I just do something really fast, there is not so much time… (Collects some snapshots from the board with both hands) Well, I believe they should then lie… (Hesitates) These are the light… (points to snapshots in one children’s room) These are the heavy…16 (points to snapshots in the bathroom and another chil-dren’s room, and then hesitates) Exchange… —But all this stays in the rooms. The exchange too. (Points to the rooms) That’s just quickly, very quickly…
(Video from workshop, October 2005)
Here we see something similar to the working of the shamanistic spell recounted above. When Mads places his own emergency nursing practice in the children’s room, he has accepted to articulate his lived experience in terms of the objects, words and images provided by the design game in lieu of the shaman. The game succeeds in suggesting that relations in the trauma center may be articulated in terms of the floor plan of the house. It is in itself, I believe, quite an accomplish-ment to have the nurses accept that a children’s room can meaning-fully express qualities of the fire burn treatment room.
There is usually a tight schedule for the succession of design games in the workshop, and this time pressure forces the players to do some fast moves in the games. Because Inge’s re-configuration of the
16 “The light” refers to lightly wounded patients, and “the heavy” refers to heavily wounded patients.
snapshots above is not fully formed when she initiates it, openings for adjustment or re-orientation become apparent underway, either for the player herself or for the other players. The game as a rehearsal where you are allowed and encouraged to follow instinct is evident in the tentative language of “I don’t know”, “or whatever”, “I just do something really fast”, and “that’s just quickly”. Although the pro-duced configuration is incomplete it is not to be dismissed as mere exercise, because as a traversal of the design space, it entails the possibility of becoming a path. This ephemeral aspect of exploratory design is extremely difficult to conceptualize—precisely because it deals with the negotiation of not-yet-articulated possibilities. As we shall see in a moment, this particular configuration of exchange in all the rooms does in fact become a path (why else would I choose to recount it here, one may ask).
The nurses’ use of the notions “on stage”, “flow”, “exchange”, and
“outlook”—which were brought into the workshop by the architects—
indicate how the meaning of these have been negotiated in the previ-ous game and has now become an accepted part of the players’ lan-guage. The notion “exchange” deserves a bit more explanation to clarify what is meant by the suggestion that it should stay in all the rooms. During the previous game the players have developed “ex-change” as shorthand for many things, such as the sparring between a nurse and a physician around a particular patient, sharing of informa-tion among nurses, dialogue with relatives and more. These different elements of “exchange” stem from the initial video snapshots from the Trauma Center. “Exchange” as the physical game piece that the players are now re-positioning, consist of multiple video cards held together by a paper clip.
In order for the metaphors and symbols to work, for them to in-duce a liminal sense of displacement and a different order, they must be exerted with some authority.
Mads: (nurse)“…but I also think I would tear down that wall (between the hallway and the living room) and then gather many of the func-tions closer together, and then uhm…”
Karina (architect): “but then the room suddenly gets gigantic!”
Mads: “It does... But then we could have some room dividers”
Kristina (camera woman): “You are not allowed to tear down the walls.”
(Pause)
Inge: (chief nurse) “We are not allowed to tear down the walls. Is that what you are saying?”
Kristina: “Not yet.”
(Video from workshop, October 2005)
When Kristina here asserts without reservations what the players can and cannot do, she enforces the power of the metaphor; it is not some-thing to be taken lightly or erased by the stroke of a pen. Kristina is a research assistant who has up till now mainly been quiet in operating the video camera and the enforcement comes as something of a sur-prise to the chief nurse. The rules for the games are provided with the game boards and game pieces in text, but not everything can be explained in writing up-front; and therefore the facilitators take on a role as masters of ceremony, in that they posses knowledge of these unusual rules and procedures. By adding the calm and self confident answer “Not yet”, the situation is performed as a ritual: the magic of the spell will be broken if we do not follow the master of ceremony’s guidance by shifting working mode too soon.
Let me provide two examples of metaphorical relationships from the other group working with the theater board. The entrance way for traumatized patients in ambulances, which needs to be kept clear and ready at all times was seen as the actors’ exclusive entrance to the theatrical stage, where they immediately become the centers of atten-tion due to the circular arrangement of the audience, the lighting etc.
The trauma center’s entry for relatives and patients who show up themselves—and who may suffer from less acute problems to be treated elsewhere—was seen as the public entrance hall to a theater, where the audience passes through a ticket counter to check the legitimacy of their presence. The staff kitchen in the Trauma Center was seen as the actors’ back stage dressing room with regard to being an exclusive staff area, and a possibility for social retreat from the demands of being front stage.
Figure 17: The two game boards of the residential floor plan and the theater after the games are over.
These kinds of seeing as were of course not a matter of direct mappings in the games, but rather characterized by continuous ex-perimental arrangements, where the players’ negotiations were guided by references to the video snapshots from the field.
After the metaphorical game the resulting clusters of snapshots and their spatial confinement on the two floor plans were cut out, and prepared as input for the third game and last game of the workshop.
In this game the two groups take turns as they place their clusters of snapshots on the game board, eventually to make up a desirable spatial arrangement of the Trauma Center in a near future. At this point the players who stand and sit around a table have become accustomed with reaching in to re-position some of the snapshots on the game board. In this situation the groups discover how they have both assembled snapshots to form a secretariat, among these the cluster making up “exchange”, and after having placed the various elements of the secretariat in the center of the board, they begin discussing an alternative:
Margrethe (nurse): “in fact, it could be placed in each and every room...”
(Gazing at the board)
Inge (chief nurse): “how do you mean?”
Margrethe: “Then there would have to be permanent staff in there, and computers in all the rooms... and patient records”
Inge: “Mads and I recommend that! Because as many tasks as possible should be in the treatment rooms, and as close to the patients as pos-sible. That is one of our philosophies.”
Margrethe: “Then it would also be a new organization of work, because then when you arrive in each shift you would have to arrange who
Figure 18: The players cut out spatial arrangements from the theater board to be reused in the next game.
goes to the burn injury room, and who goes to the trauma room, and then you would simply go and stay there.”
Inge: “and then you are in a room, instead of receiving a particular pa-tient, that is, you are in some rooms and just stay there—that’s the model we talked about.”
Margrethe: “because then you have your workstation there, and run things from there...”
(Video from workshop, October 2005)
It is due to the tangible character of the—by now—quite complex game pieces that the nurses are able to move around the elements and functioning of the secretariat with such apparent ease. As in a ritual, the games create a simulacrum of experienced events which afford the players an opportunity to re-configure them in ways their everyday life could not be. When they discuss the secretariat here, the players invoke also the cluster “exchange” for example. A “workstation” in this context is not merely a synonym for a computer. It involves nursing tools, medical utensils, and many resources from the current secre-tariat, as well as computational support for care, communication and documentation. It is not just “things”, however; also various interac-tions between nurses are part of the cluster “exchange”. The sugges-tion is to distribute all this to small satellites at the sites of actual patient treatment. After the sequence above the players suggest to supplement it by a position of outlook from where overview of the incoming patients and the capacity of each nursing area can be main-tained. A central role associated with the position of outlook is triage:
the function of sorting incoming patients according to their need for care and the available resources. Mads catches this idea and develops a little scenario to support it:
Mads (nurse): “When an ambulance arrives, well, ‘you should go down to observation area four—bed number so and so should be vacant’…
Then the nurse was down there, aha, ‘the patient goes to my area’.
And then you know that somebody made the decision that I should take care of this. This must mean that the others are doing some-thing else (…)”
Inge (chief nurse): “Because as it is now, some are better to spot where the jobs are, and where they are most needed, than others…”
(Video from workshop, October 2005)
Here Mads develops a complex scenario on the fly. He shifts from
setting the scene (“when an ambulance arrives”) to performing the
individual character of the person responsible for overview and triage,
who says “you should go down to observation area 4”. Then Mads
shifts back again to continue setting the situation (“then the nurse
was down there”) and then on to performing another individual char-acter, that of the nurse (“the patient goes to my area”). And finally he assumes the voice of the nurse again but in a way that incorporates his own view (“then you know that somebody made the decision that I should take care of this”), which expresses Mads’ personal irritation with the current practice where nurses have to negotiate among themselves who will leave their current task, when an ambulance comes in.
I find it quite amazing how the participants in a few intense sen-tences like these can juggle realities, fitting in particular concerns as well as more generic constraints and a multiplicity of perspectives.
Although this ability is certainly dependent on the skill of the partici-pants, the workshop situation and the design games are determining for the establishment of a situation where it can play out. The liminal-ity of the design ritual has enabled the players to rehearse roles and re-configurations that would not immediately have been acknowledged as meaningful.
And in turn, these rehearsals have been necessary steps for the transition between the two last games; the movement from an explic-itly metaphorical space with its playful practicing, to the last game which is less metaphorical and a more direct representation of the
Figure 19: The last game board as it is arranged while the players develop future scenarios. Very concrete game pieces have been brought into play from the previous metaphorical games. In the bottom we see for example “ticket counter” and “stage entrance”. They have been cut out from a highly metaphorical setting but here take on quite literal qualities as two particular kinds of entrances to the ideal Trauma Center.
future trauma center as the players conceive of it. In the scenario we see developed in the end, the playful “as if” is intertwined with very concrete concerns.
While the design games work to install in the participants a sense of playful exploration of possibilities, they are also a demand to act; to perform collaboratively and creatively. In producing temporary game moves or concrete design suggestions the participants are forced to reach temporary agreement and convergence in goals. This demand, however, is confined to the playful frame of the games. When the game is over, the success of the event is measured on the extent to which concerns about the design situation have been articulated in evocative ways, not on the degree to which everybody has been brought to agree on shared values. In other words, forcing the partici-pants to act collectively and to arrive at singular solutions does not imply any naïve assumptions about erasing their differences in inter-est or power, but rather an idea of suspending and subverting them momentarily for the sake of a transformative performance. The ex-ploratory character of this kind of workshop is emphasized by not forcing its results into a conclusive session in the end, where partici-pants have to reach a common compromise to capture the importance of the workshop in a set of bullets or the like. The most important results from the workshop reside in the minds of the participants as renewed and continued thinking about what the design situation could be, given the various interests and material possibilities articu-lated at the workshop; and of course in the video documentation of the event.
The reference to the real must not over-shadow the possibility of
linking empirical snapshots to alternatives. The game pieces and
game boards of design games do not primarily work by matching up
with real life phenomena—the game boards are not miniature worlds
of scale figures, but rather metaphorical parallels. The estranging
function of the design game is to stand apart from ordinary life, both
criticizing it through distance (re-positioning the players to conceive of
it in a new light) and controlling it through distance (stepping outside
of it to control it, through overview and manipulation of it by proxies,
such as the game pieces). Yet the ethnographic snapshots on the game
board are dependent on their origin in people’s real lives; the intimacy
of the field encounter is necessary for the ability to evoke new
trans-formed images of use that are credible. In the snapshots from the
Trauma Center, for example, the nurses were highly recognizable, yet
there practice only fragmentarily depicted. The game pieces in the
workshops operate metonymically as fragments of an imaginary Trauma Center. The video snapshots and probing materials point to a whole, even if it is an imaginary whole. The design games offer a stage on which to unfold the nursing practice; and the physical presence and participation of the nurses themselves are crucial elements in succeed-ing with this. As skilled practitioners they provide the related stories and contextual information that may be necessary for the players to combine the fragmentary material into a loosely weaved whole. It is obvious that someone around the game board will be more familiar with the concrete situation of the snapshot than others, but the rule of the game is that the collaborative performance of the imaginary whole must have places for the particular snapshots.
During the workshops with trauma nurses a number of local practices were discussed with relevance for the conceptualization of configura-bility. The discussions expressed a number of recurring collisions between opposing concerns: Maintaining overview vs. preparing medication: The staff must constantly be on guard with regard to alarms, emergencies and incoming patients (“outlook”). However, preparing medication and syringes for injection for example, demands high degrees of concentration (“shield”, “control”). Maintaining an overview of peripheral activities in the Trauma Center threatens the precision and security of correct medication. Maintaining overview vs.
speaking with patients and relatives: It takes confidentiality and a confined space to carry out conversations about serious personal health issues, often about life and death. This, again, is in contrast with the demand to constantly being available should something more serious occur that demands the full attention of the staff. Pause vs.
caring for patients: The pauses of the staff are constantly interrupted, which sometimes makes it hard to find occasions for private conversa-tions, which can be very important among colleagues who have been involved in overwhelming emergency situations. These are only select examples of collisions that taken together can be thought of as central dimensions or parameters of the design space for architectural inter-ventions in the Trauma Center.
Conclusion
I have treated the challenge of creating collaborative occasions for
re-inventing realities as one of defining the relevant set of interests,
bringing their representatives together, and facilitating a provisional
transformation of the matter-of-concern through various hands-on
explorations of it.
Latour’s notion of assemblies of people, who gather around a sub-ject matter because it divides them, has here served as a reminder to acknowledge differences in interests as a driving force for the collabo-ration rather than an obstacle to be eliminated. The notion of assem-bly emphasizes the importance of defining sets of relevant interests for each project, so as to know which parties are relevant to gather for a particular issue. It makes a big difference for example, if the parties are predominantly interaction designers as in COMIT, or professional nurses as in Flexible Treatment Rooms, or software developers as in the workshop with Thy:Data recounted below. It is, however, beyond doubt an important challenge in itself to create a project setup that spans different industries and competencies, and still succeed in bringing the parties out of their respective organizations and into a collaborative design workshop. I have suggested to thinking and managing the design workshop as a ritual, where the ontological status of the issue is destabilized and prepared for transformation through a state of liminality. And finally I have shown how a series of different design games may enable the participants to connect ex-perimentally to the issue in question.
Improvising Embodied Interaction
…human practice and understanding in everyday life should be taken as the ontological and epistemological point of departure in inquiries into design and use of computer artifacts.
(Ehn 1988:28)
For the field of interaction design it makes much sense to take
inter-action seriously. But what does this mean in a design context? In
offering an answer to this, Paul Dourish has focused on embodiment
as a central property of interaction, and thus suggested to start design
where the action is, namely in the bodily interaction with people and
artifacts (Dourish 2001). Pelle Ehn’s proposal to take human practice
as the starting point for design work, cited above, is thus further
elaborated by Dourish, when he suggests a foundation for embodied
interaction to focus on the concrete material and bodily experience of
interacting with an artifact (Dourish 2001). Dourish and also other
authors (McCullough 2004; Klemmer, Hartmann et al. 2006) have
raised the attention to the important issue of embodiment within
various fields of design. If the embodied meeting with the designed
artifact is taken as a starting point for design, and not something to be
tested towards the end of a design process, then the role of
ethnogra-phy in design must orient itself towards making this meeting
avail-able for inquiry and change. Ethnography is well equipped to observe bodily expressions, but when it comes to exploring how these might be different the traditional language-bias of ethnography becomes a limit. The enactment-sessions in COMIT and Mobility in Maintenance thus draw heavily on ideas and methods from dramaturgical perform-ance (Binder 1999), while still in a certain sense mimicking the ex-ploratory nature of the ethnographic inquiry.
On 18 May 2005, Jens and I travelled to KiM’s in Søndersø to meet Lasse and Palle again. The goal of the day was to produce a number of future scenarios, where the developed design concepts and mock-ups were explored further in their “natural” context, i.e. in the hands of working service technicians on the shop floor. It was a regular work shift for Lasse and Palle, and in the quit workshop area, where we met, I introduced the session thus:
Joachim: “What we would like to do now, is to explain to you what the concepts are all about. And then hear what you think about them—if there are any of them that you just cannot relate to because they are too silly, or if there are any of them that you could maybe imagine to be relevant for your work. And then we will ask you to enact them with us, i.e. go out to the relevant machines and carry out your work as well as you can, but where you use, or pretend to use these for, uhm… for what you… for the task.”
(From video of enactment, May 2005)
Leading us, thereafter, quickly in and out of the labyrinthic spaces between big industrial machines, Palle was in his element, pointing out one that needed special attention. It was momentarily not in operation, and thus available for inspection and preventive mainte-nance care, Palle explained. He pushed a few buttons starting up the machine, listened to it and looked at it from different angles. While Palle mentioned a special tool for listening to the inner sounds of mechanical parts, he slipped out his screwdriver from his working pants using that instead to point at the motor gear, thus conveying the sounds from it to his ear, which he pressed against the other end of the screwdriver.
Though Palle had appeared somewhat taciturn and with-holding
during our last encounter in the design workshop, he now seemed
energized or even rejuvenated as he engaged himself in the
explora-tion of how he could put the imagined product concepts to use. Why
had his reluctance or inability towards active participation in the
design games at the workshop shifted to such an enthusiastic and
voluble participation in the enactment? Probably because his knowl-edge of this place was grounded, embodied, and at hand. Contrary to his audience, Palle knew exactly what he could do with these ma-chines. This habitus was in his very body as he moved self-consciously through the machine park, touching, looking, and listening to the machines so familiar to him. Palle’s easiness towards performing his regular work practices to us and the camera, did not, however, imme-diately apply to the way he handled the mock-ups.
Palle had agreed to experiment with making use of a range of pieces of blue polystyrene foam, which were introduced to him as mock-ups of ideas for new mobile applications. In this sense they where placehold-ers for a complex of extremely portable hardware platforms, software applications dedicated to specific maintenance tasks, technological infrastructure for wireless communication, network connections with the corporate information system and with external suppliers and service providers, and many more details that had not yet been speci-fied or even thought of. Although the mock-ups could be taken to represent, for example, a Pocket PC running a Windows operating system and the enterprise resource planning system Axapta with special extensions, we sought to avoid closing down the scope of possi-ble applications by adhering to the conventions connoted by these systems. In contrast to the complexity of their imaginative actualiza-tion, their immediate appearance was deliberately simplified, almost to the extent where any portable object could have been used.
Describing the role of theatrical props in performance activities, Schechner argues that
(…) during the performance these objects are of extreme importance, of-ten the focus of the whole activity. Sometimes, as in theater and chil-dren’s play, they are decisive in creating the symbolic reality. The
“otherworldiness” of play, sports, games, theater, and ritual is enhanced by the extreme disparity between the value of the objects outside the ac-tivity when compared to their value as foci of the acac-tivity.
(Schechner 1988:11).
As foci of the enactment, the mock-ups did stand out in their peculiar
light blue color, and were thus distinctly not just any objects. Rather
they stood out as a collection of foreign objects, not part of the regular
work environment, but introduced to prompt reflection and the
possi-bility of change. The general openness for interpretation is indicative
of the mock-ups’ function as improvisational props; they are intended
to be attributed new meanings in the course of the performance;
meanings that cannot be predicted but emerge as the actor makes use of them in responding to the ad hoc challenges of situated mainte-nance practice.
While Palle was performing the listening-through-a-screwdriver act, I momentarily switched from spectator to a mode of “stage manage-ment” and asked suggestively if it would make sense for him to record the sound with the handheld mock-up, in order to provide a more rich description of the worn parts of the machine for future reference. Palle clearly found this suggestion far fetched, but he smilingly went on to carry out the suggested action. He pressed the handheld mock-up towards the tip of the screwdriver instead of pressing his ear against it, pretending to record the sound. Palle turned his head looking at us over his shoulder, illustrating with a distancing grin how untenable the idea was to him. In more polite ways he then explained to us why this would not work in practice for him.
The situation demonstrates the tension between engaged partici-pation and the use of a script for the performance. Looking back, I was eager to get the mock-ups activated on the stage. When I as “stage manager” of the performance was trying too hard to get Palle to act out particular ideas for interaction, it remained his privilege to with-draw his engagement from the performance and “just do as I told him to”, withdrawing his own stakes in the act.
While the design team as a whole had surely devised many pre-conceptions of how we thought the mock-ups could be meaningfully used by Palle and Lasse, the whole idea of bringing them back to the shop floor at this early stage of design was not to add visual demon-strations of them, but rather to accelerate the open-ended exploration of their value and relevance in a bodily way. The challenge was to develop the concepts further by drawing on the rich knowledge of maintenance practice embodied in the shop-floor environment. The last thing we wanted was to end up with a performance that rendered Palle and Lasse as awkward puppets in a pastiche of their own lives, because we had directed them too strictly. Palle’s role as I see it was not to present a fictional character whose life was separable from his own, but to show himself in a special way. If keeping too strictly to a preconceived script for enactment there is an immediate risk of loos-ing the users’ engaged participation, and with that both the effective-ness and legitimacy of the participatory approach.
On the other hand, working with no script at all, based on the false
assumption that it would result in more “free” thinking and acting,
would leave the untrained performer with an unbearable
responsibil-ity to satisfy criteria for success that were unknown to him. The script together with the physical mock-ups constitute a necessary initiative for the performer to respond to, while they also convey a sense of what we as design researchers are after. Instead of providing Lasse and Palle a detailed manuscript for the drama, they were given a sketch of the basic functions of each of the design concepts and a few simple ideas for their application. The goal was to provide just enough fram-ing and scriptfram-ing to move them and begin a dialogue, while leavfram-ing as much space for improvisation as possible.
Schechner pointed out about the improvisational actor that s/he
“is freed from both director and drama, but s/he will therefore have to make fuller use of conventions (stock situations and characters, audience’s expectations, etc.) and the physical space” (Schechner 1988:18). Our case is not a fully improvisational act because ongoing interruptions to give directions and stage management necessarily occur, and the act is supported by preconceived dramatic situations for the actor to fall back upon, should the improvisation not occur as smoothly as intended. The demand to make fuller use of conventions and the physical space is still, however, precisely the ambition of the enactment; to mobilize the performer’s memories of prior incidents, colleagues’ past remarks and concerns, the constraints and possibili-ties embodied in the physical space of machines and their typical behavior. The demand on the performer to making use of the audi-ence’s expectations deserves special attention here. The audience of this particular improvisational act consisted of two design researchers immediately present—Jens and I—and an extended design team from MBS whose attention was mediated by the video camera. Compared to the individuals making up audiences in traditional theatres, the expectations of this audience have a rather explicit collective direction towards the development of the performance, a direction towards the design of certain types of mobile applications.
During this project the ability to carry out preventive maintenance
care, rather than repairing more urgent breakdowns, was an
oft-mentioned goal for maintenance practice in general. As we walk from
the workshop area, after having introduced Palle to the design ideas
and the session of enactment, he sets the scene by stating that when
he has time to initiate preventive maintenance care “it will typically
be an area like this, which is stopped that I would go through”. With
regard to using the mockups as props in the performance, however,
Palle has no clear idea about his audience’s expectations. In the
beginning he is hesitant in handling them because he does not know
what we are after. And while Palle tries to figure it out iteratively
through acting and reading the response, we on our side try to tell him through suggestions that are ambiguous enough to give him a chance to appropriate them and turn them around for his own purposes. The fact that the articulation of the audience’s expectations and the per-former’s making use of them is only gradually developing throughout the performance is no surprise since we have few established protocols to base our interactions on: improvised future scenarios are far from an established genre, Palle is trained as a smith not as an actor, and Jens and I are but amateur stage managers. But more importantly it illustrates on a small scale the dialogical character of this design process.
Rather than stating too flatly what applications we want to de-sign (and thus reducing Palle to an illustrative character), or have Palle too directly articulate his needs for new applications (and thus shaping new technologies in the image of confined practices), the design process is more like a dialogue, where participants continu-ously shift out action from one frame of reference to another. Use practice and design ideas are reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this tentative process of performing possibilities. The imagined technologies embedded in the mock-ups prompt Palle to act in ways not otherwise possible; and the imaginative ways that Palle engages the mock-ups in response to his bodily work practices alters the poten-tial for what they could become as functional products. The temporal-ity of the partly improvised performance is where the contours of both use practice and design ideas emerge; it is where the construction and interactive stabilization of new design possibilities for practice and technology are tried out.
With no clear demarcation of the suspension of “real life” and the
beginning of the enactment, Palle walks to the other end of the
ma-chine and begins to check the state of a bearing. As he tries to make
use of the handheld prop to document the bearing’s state he falls out
of character and addresses us as stage managers rather than
audi-ence: “but it is not that easy to capture on video with the handheld”. As
we shall see later, Palle’s meta-comment on the difficulties of making
use of the prop to document what he is doing while he is doing it, is
more indicative of his beginner’s trouble with performing and
impro-vising, than with using the prop in this particular way. To overcome
this trouble, I suggest that he take a still picture of it instead (since
that would require less extraneous bodily comportment). Palle accepts
that a still picture would suffice for documenting the exact physical
location of the bearing, and having taken the picture he returns to the
main operating panel of the machine, where he has mounted the
tablet mock-up. Again Palle hesitates, now in transferring the image from the little handheld to the display of the larger tablet mock-up.
This hesitant bodily dialogue, both on behalf of the stage manag-ers and the performer, or the design researchmanag-ers and the user, gradu-ally evolved into a more smooth interaction in the scenarios performed later. It is important to note that the goal of the future scenario is the opposite of orthodox acting—it is not about skillfully imitating nature, representation. There are rough and unexpected turbulences, troubled interruptions and hesitance. Although characteristic of all the future scenarios I have been engaged with, these are not stylistic but the genuine meeting between user and design problem. Around two hours after we arrived at the factory that day, Palle and Lasse had grown familiar enough with the design concepts, the mock-ups, our expecta-tions and the rules of the game that they began to draw more self-consciously on stock situations, improvise and add to the design concepts by bringing their own ideas into the performed situations. To provide but a little sign of this evolving appropriation of the mock-ups, Palle developed a little routine of silently slipping the handheld mock-up into the chest pocket of his working shirt, when not actively using it.
One of the overarching issues in the project Mobility in Maintenance was the idea and hope that mobile technology could help to capture the contextual circumstances for a machine that breaks down at the point in time of the break down. In the system-oriented lingo of MBS this is referred to as “collecting the data at the source” in order to make more accurate date available for the general information sys-tem, i.e. the ERP system. In the daily practice of Lasse and Palle it was expressed as a need to know the specific details of breakdowns that often happen while they are not present. In addition, the operator who had been by the machine at the time of the breakdown was often no longer there when the service technicians arrive, sometimes hours later; either because he or she had shifted to another machine, or gone home. It is in the interest of the operator to have the machine process as fast as possible, so it is not uncommon that when the service tech-nicians arrive the machine has been restarted, sometimes processing a different product. One can imagine the difficulties of finding out what the exact settings of the machine had been, what sounds were heard, how the product was oriented on the conveyor belt, or even what product was being processed at the time of the breakdown;—
information that is crucial from a maintenance perspective to prevent
the breakdown from reoccurring.
When we first set out to produce a future scenario around this is-sue Jens and I thought that we were about to enact a situation where the machine operator actively documents the circumstances of a breakdown for the future reference of the service technicians. Lasse, however, had a different idea for the scenario. Some problems occur only periodically which makes it difficult for the service technician to detect its cause. Despite our suggestions in the direction of cooperat-ing with a machine operator, he insisted that it would be relevant and helpful to his repair practice to temporarily set up an unmanned video camera monitoring an error-prone machine. Upon returning to the machine he would be able to playback exactly the sequence of the recording that matched the time of the breakdown. After a brief explanation to us about the rationale for this scenario, Lasse takes over the performance, almost completely improvising:
Lasse: “I have seen on the big display over there (in the workshop) that they have had a problem with… with the last lid-mounting machine;
but they have not figured out the cause. Now I have… had the breakdown once, but I have not really… been able to conclude any-thing from it, because the machine operator has re-started it imme-diately after the fault. Then I arrive with my super camera and my stand… And the machine operator has stated loosely that the box stops there and there. And he can’t really say anything more, he just re-starts it and it runs (goes to place a ladder in front of the lid-mounting machine). Then I put up my little camera (places the cam-era on a step of the ladder). Then it can sit here and record and I can leave it and continue with some of the tasks that I have. (…) Then the breakdown occurs again, and I can take my camera, go to the display and then see that it is so and so and so. It is this photo-cell that causes it (points towards a little flashing red light inside the machine). It is perhaps… a wire that is broken and it is vibrating and once in a while it short-circuits, and then that is where the prob-lem is…”
(From video of enactment, May 2005)
This sequence is performed by Lasse based on no pre-given script for
the action, and with no explicit directions from us. Instead he makes
use of a stock situation from his own practice (troubleshooting periodic
errors), a non-present prop (a mock-up of a large display hanging in
the workshop area for overview of all current maintenance tasks), a
new prop introduced on-the-spot by himself (the ladder used as a
stand for the camera), and the given prop (the mock-up of a handheld
media recording device). In his monologue to the audience that
accom-panies his bodily performance, he shifts between explanatory
contex-tual information in the past participle (e.g. “I have seen on the big
display over there…”) and direct descriptions of his immediate actions in the present tense (e.g. “Then I put up my little camera”).
The degree to which Lasse takes control of the enactment here is indicative of his acceptance of its rules: A performative space has been created, where he can rearrange time, assign value to things, and utilize prior incidents as resources, while realizing new ways of accom-plishing his goals. Because Lasse accepts this temporary standing apart from ordinary work life at the shop floor, he is enabled in very concrete and bodily ways to articulate both the discrepancy between motivations for machine operators (to get the machine running here and now) and motivations for service technicians (to prevent the machine from stopping again), and his concern with accomplishing this maintenance goal through new media technologies.
Figure 20: Enacted future scenario 'Diagnosing and Curing' from the project Mobility in Maintenance.
In the video scenario “Diagnosing and Curing” Palle handles the tablet and the handheld mock-ups in similarly convincing ways as if they were “natural” parts of his working environment. He shows no hesitation in acting as if he were video recording the mechanical cycle of a faulty machine operation. In fact, after Palle has transferred the video recordings from the handheld to the tablet, while simultane-ously explaining his interactions with the machine and the mock-ups to the audience, he suggests a significant new application feature that had not been mentioned before. By playing back the video of the faulty cycle in slow motion on the display of the tablet the exact features of the mechanical fault is revealed to him—features that the very fast operation of the machine had prevented the human eye from register-ing.
The development from the first attempts at enactment with Lasse and Palle to the later ones, illustrates the process of learning and delicate negotiations that enabled us design researchers to suggest more relevant maintenance practices. It also led the users to take owner-ship of the design concepts to the extent where they not only handled them competently as if they were actually functioning, but activated their grounded, embodied and profound knowledge of how to keep the machines running. Evoking the embodied habitus of the service technicians in the performance of a future scenario is an attempt to go beyond the practice of describing and knowing the user. The embodied habitus of the user is beyond reach for others to know; it does not let itself easily be represented in other formats than its own: the body proper. The user’s embodied habitus may be brought to bear in a performance of the doing of the body, imitating the future through the real, and thus leading to glimpses of prior incidents, concerns and situations prompted by the particular present situation; but it will not reveal the embodied habitus of a user to an extend where it can be represented, brought out of the field and “home”.
This way of staging future scenarios is consciously trying to
cre-ate a stcre-ate of limbo with regard to the ontological status of the
per-formance. It is not in any strict sense an occasion for observing how
maintenance work is regularly carried out; neither for a controlled
evaluation of a confined product candidate. Yet it is both a
continua-tion of the ethnographic field study (in that it yields new insights
about existing maintenance practice) and it is a continuation of the
generative design work (in that it evokes new ideas for the concept
design). In Turner’s words the state of the performance is betwixt and
between. The activity adheres neither to the ordinary order of existing
everyday use, nor to the ordinary order of idea generation and -evaluation. Yet, it is both a continued inquiry into maintenance practice, and an exploration of possibilities for changing it. The act of performance fosters identification between the dissimilar ontologies of the here and now and the there and then without reducing them to sameness. The unsettled status of the activity works to create a space of grounded possibility, where the skilled practitioner is included in the effort to bring about design ideas that are rooted in his/her prac-tice.
Temporary Closures
With this section I will address the shifting processes of openings and closures on different levels of the design process. While it is an explicit ambition of the approach laid out here to create empirical snapshots that are open-ended and evocative, there are also clear attempts at closing down their range of possible interpretations. I will discuss this in terms of the metaphor of picking low-hanging fruit to bring into a workshop. All projects come to an end, and throughout the process a considerable amount of effort is spent on procuring arguments, ques-tions, insights, and artifacts in a deliverable format for the eventual moment of project closure. I will treat the format for packaging design anthropological deliverables as a physical device that works as a vehicle for the project results, which in turn is an important prepara-tion for the critical passage, where the project is to be handed over to a partner. In the end of this section I will explore the possibility of finding new openings in the design anthropological account, as it has been delivered in a Designer Package. I will do this by looking at our attempt at unpacking a concrete Designer Package in a workshop with software developers from Thy:Data.
Low-Hanging Fruit
In carrying out the actual field visits and preparing the material for subsequent workshops, I have found that my own wish to perform well has been something of an obstacle. Imagining the whole range of project partners waiting to hear and see the valuable field observa-tions reasonably enough makes you want to produce something of value. The problem, however, is precisely what it is that makes some observations valuable and others not so valuable.
When we first watched the footage of a service technician who tries to
find a machine drawing and he enters the room with fairly chaotic
cabinets with seemingly unsorted binders and papers lying around, we reacted in much the same way as did the workshop participants recounted in chapter 2: we laughed; see Figure 21. But when the service technician eventually finds a drawing and says: “it could look like it had something to do with it…—but where the hell is the rest of it!?” his despair is not only entertaining. It also relieves us from the uncertainty if our observations will be of value to the project partners, because with this snapshot, we have obviously delivered “a problem”.
This is what I mean by low-hanging fruit: the snapshots that are easy, because they demand little effort of you. The trouble is that design-wise the clip is not very interesting, precisely because it is framed so tightly that we instantly know what to make of it. The easy, obvious problems like these entice us to device quick-fixes. On the basis of this clip, it is almost trivial to suggest that they need to sort out their machine drawings and get an electronic document handling system.
But it stops there. It speaks to our preconceptions and we are not forced to do anything with the clip.
Let me provide two other examples of empirical snapshots that enticed a problem-solving attitude in the following design session instead of a genuine exploration. They are not low-hanging fruit from the perspective of producing evocative design materials, in that the snapshots were not framed tightly as an obvious and unambiguous problem. However, they were treated as low-hanging fruit by work-shop participants who were quick to define them as problems. The first is also from Mobility in Maintenance, the next is from COMIT.
Two specific video clips of Lasse shown in the first Mobility in Maintenance workshop illustrate the complexity of maintenance work.
Beyond the obvious element of technically complicated machines that are sometimes hard to troubleshoot, the snapshots illustrate the
Figure 21: The service technicians have trouble finding the right machine drawings.
complexity of simultaneously handling multiple tasks that may sud-denly shift in relative levels of urgency. While the clips undeniably illustrate complexity and a challenge to prioritize between tasks, the question of what to make of that complexity remains an open ques-tion. During a design game in the first workshop a player forms a technology composite with Lego blocks and holds it against his head, as if he were receiving advice or instructions from the imaginary device regarding what task to carry out next: “it must be possible to develop a prioritization mechanism; it must be possible to develop some rules.” Hereby the situation is defined as an algorithmic chal-lenge of modeling the work of service technicians. The design space is prematurely bracketed off, because a solution is defined without exploring adjacent possibilities or knowing if it addresses a relevant problem.
This question of what to make of a given snapshot is a recurrent issue in all three projects. Let us look at one that played out in the first COMIT workshop after we have watched a video snapshot from Rick-ard’s office work as a sales agent:
Rickard dials a phone number and uses the brief pause before the recep-tionist answers to ask a question to a colleague. When the receprecep-tionist answers, Rickard interrupts the conversation with the colleague who stands by his desk. While he is waiting for his call to be put through to the specific customer, he finishes the conversation with the colleague. A moment later Rickard dials a number on the mobile work phone with his right hand. While waiting for someone to answer, he picks up his private mobile phone with his left hand. On this he fetches the number of a friend. The customer does not answer, so Rickard makes a note in the customer database on the pc, and dials the friend’s number. A
mo-Figure 22: A player has built an imaginary prioritization device and holds it to the head imagining it provides instructions for the service technicians on what to do next.
ment later a customer calls on the work phone, and Rickard interrupts his friend to hang up and receive the call.
(Description based on video from field visit, April 2002)
In the short sequence—less than five minutes—we see Rickard shift between a range of electronic devices and roles, some of them in parallel. Two participants in the workshop saw herein a problem to be corrected by design. They insisted that Rickard in their future sce-nario should only have one phone, thereby correcting what they found to be his disruptive phone practice through simplification.
These readings of the video snapshots of the service technician and the sales agent who both handle multiple tasks in parallel are indicative of a certain dream of automation and fascination with technology, where the attraction is to delegate complex operations such as prioritizing maintenance tasks or phone conversations to a system which can deal with them in more transparent ways based on algorithms.
In my reading of the video snapshots Lasse consciously displays a high level of complexity not because he wants to complain about it or because he is about to give up, but rather because he takes pride in the role of competent problem solver: the more complex the situation with machines needing more or less urgent attention from him, the more legitimate his claim to professional competency. Accordingly with Rickard, whose complex interactions and quick shifts between roles I took to be impressively competent.
To assist in bringing about interesting empirical snapshots and trans-form them into valuable design contributions through exploratory workshops, I suggest aiming for a somewhat paradoxical controlled uncertainty. The challenge lies in resisting the temptation of bringing too many low-hanging fruits into the design process because it results in premature closure, and instead raise the chances of being sur-prised. While it may induce fear not to know what the point of certain snapshots is, what their meaning is, or where the story in them will end, it is precisely in this open-endedness that their value for explora-tory design may reside. I write may reside, for there is no guarantee.
In my teaching of qualitative observational field methods to
stu-dents of design, it has been a recurrent source of frustration for many
of them that there is no certainty in knowing what to look for. You
never know for sure which of your observations will turn out to be
important. Controlled uncertainty requires you to wait for the
empiri-cal material to become meaningful, and it requires due respect for the
difficulties of working one’s way into it. With controlled uncertainty I
wish to conceptualize the ephemeral quality of design; the ways in
which we can construct imaginative horizons that frame how to make sense of a certain experience, but have to acknowledge the inability to predict how or which snapshots from the field will become meaningful through generative design sessions; for example through montage, where meaning arises from experimental collisions of fragmentary elements from different contexts of the design situation.
In passing up the possibility of delivering a concluded set of prob-lems to be solved by obvious solutions, there is, however something more to be gained. By providing an open-ended range of materials you invite the other stakeholders in the project—each more competent in their field than you—to actively create the opportunities for linking snapshots with technological possibilities. The task is thus not so much the development of particular problems, but rather the devel-opment of a whole space of ambiguous opportunities, which resist full articulation.
Packaging Design Anthropological Deliverables
Besides from the present academic reflection long after-the-fact, the three design projects generated three kinds of results:
– new images of use and users within the given fields
– collaborative design platforms for exploration and devel-opment across diverse competencies and organizational di-vides
– catalogues of new design ideas
However, the question of how to deliver a design anthropological account of a collaborative design project is still open. Within acade-mia, the literary means of an ethnographic monography with an audience taken to be largely familiar with the discourse is a fairly well-established format for delivering anthropological knowledge. A challenge for the practice of design anthropology is that the whole setting of such a scene, where an account can be presented has to be established in the actual project each and every time.
Finding a physical format for presenting project results in a way
that convincingly express what we want to say to our project partners
about engagement, open-endedness and participation has been a
concern for my colleagues and me since the COMIT project. Instead of
articulating the process mainly as text in a report or white paper, we
have sought to integrate the representation and mediation of the
design process with the approach itself. The fragmented and dialogic
aspects of the approach were in the COMIT project embodied in the
form of the final deliverable, which was yet not very final. With the COMIT Designer Workshop Package we provided the design materials from the project in an open-ended format that allowed for it to be re-engaged in other design processes involving mobile IT products. As illustrated by Figure 23, a the Designer Workshop Package contained compact discs with all the video snapshots from the field visits and the enacted future scenarios, as well as four booklets: “COMIT process”,
“Helle”, “Rickard” and “Ronny”. The role model for the format of the booklets is the renowned series of children’s books: “the pixie book”, which measures ten by ten centimeters and counts 24 color pages, each composed of an illustration and a few lines of text. For the COMIT booklets the format was adjusted to accommodate slightly more text and images. The goal was, after all, not to address children, but to provide elements more loosely connected than is the case with conventional research reports.
Instead of presenting the developed scenarios and concepts as fi-nalized results, the material was designed to afford further re-combinations and modifications either within the content of the package itself, or with different material from other contexts. After the project one of the partners in the IT industry took up the idea and proceeded with their own version of the process employed in COMIT.
However, I have no evidence of the particulars hereof, so it is impossi-ble for me to say how the idea of delivering a box full of resources that
Figure 23: The deliverable to all project participants: the COMIT Designer Workshop Package
embody some sort of continuation of the design dialogue, as opposed to its conclusion, actually played out.
In the project Mobility in Maintenance the deliverable was de-signed with the same idea in mind of producing a physical object that heightens the chances that the project material lives on and mutates in new contexts. In the booklets titled “Lasse” and “Palle” each page was composed of an image from the respective service technician’s work practice and as such corresponded to a video clip. The image was accompanied by a brief and straight-forward text to explain the image on the opposite page. By tearing out the image pages of a user booklet and placing them on foot stands, one would essentially have a set of game pieces for The Theme Game.
Through an unexpected extension of the project Mobility in Maintenance, we got an opportunity to re-open the Designer Package and engage an audience of technical experts in its re-working, which I shall return to.
Critical Passage
Let us take a closer look at a hand-over meeting of the project Mobility in Maintenance, to illustrate how the conditions for the design an-thropological account and the account itself are negotiated. On June 20
th2005 we held a power-point presentation of the project results in a meeting room of the Microsoft Development Center in Vedbæk to Niels Bo Theilgård the General Manager of MBS in Denmark and some colleagues. The meeting was arranged by our primary contact in MBS, Lead Program Manager Thomas Jensen. The following account of the situation is constructed and translated from my notes taken during the meeting.
Figure 24: The Mobility in Maintenance Designer Package. Or the Black-Box as it was also referred to, indicating not only color and shape, but also its ambition of magically containing a complex and living project inside the opaque surface.
After I have presented the process of the project, the General Manager contrasts our use of video snapshots with methods of constructing a domain model based on analysis. While our use of video may capture what actually happens, it does not, supposedly, say anything about things that does not happen, or that ought to happen?
In response Thomas, the Lead Program Manager, who had par-ticipated in the workshop, took the role of explaining how our ap-proach actually did concern non-observable phenomena, as for example in exploring the cooperation between machine operators and service technicians, which was framed as an under-exploited resource for maintenance.
My colleague continues by presenting the design results and shows the enacted future scenarios of service technicians using the concept mock-ups. The General Manager asks us how Palle is imag-ined to use the tablet PC, “—what does he see on the screen?” I begin to answer the question directly, by referring to the specific difficulties the service technicians have with relating a known position of a component in a logical diagram with the often unknown concrete physical location of the component. Again, the Lead Program Manager addresses the General Manager and reframes the question, by stating quite assertively that the interesting part is not exactly how the concept works, but rather that the service technician Palle becomes an active resource in the generation of ideas.
After the presentation it is announced that it is time for ques-tions. The General Manager begins with an inviting “Yes?” Since we were invited as presenters, and he was the primary invited audience, it struck me that he held his own opinion or questions back like this;
as if he urged his colleagues to say something. The Lead Program Manager had, after all, supposedly had an agenda in setting up this meeting and in showing the project to him. After a short while of silence and looking around the table the Lead Program Manager gives in and explains his reason: “—this is a completely different way of working than what we do today“. The General Manager comments that our results are weakened by leaving out what is behind the user interface—the back bone of the system:
Niels (General Manager) : “How far will you go in that direction? (Ad-dressing us, researchers)
(…)
Jens (Researcher): “—there is a potential in getting information from the shop-floor into your systems…”
Niels: “—the data generated by these concepts have no home in our
Niels: “—the data generated by these concepts have no home in our